Robert Pattinson, Zendaya's The Drama is disturbing, controversial and fascinating

When we talk about Robert Pattinson and Zendaya's new movie The Drama, we're going to have to keep it relatively abstract.

That's not because there's little to say about the pseudo rom-com, actual psychological endurance test from writer-director Kristoffer Borgli.

In fact, there's a near-endless level of discourse just waiting to be had — both about the bait-and-switch experience that scores of filmgoers expecting a cute date-night movie are about to have, and the incoming tidal wave of outrage around Borgli's borderline cavalier treatment of an incredibly serious real-life issue. 

But we have to be more than a bit circumspect there. Because in an example of genius movie marketing rivalling only Longlegs' heart-monitor theatrics, production company A24 has kept the turn in this movie mostly hidden — all while teasing the rose-coloured, impossibly charismatic romance between this year's two biggest stars. 

In fact, it may have kept the secret too well. Because even though The Drama blossoms into an incredibly interesting and subversive investigation into the terminal limits of empathy and redemption, that may not even matter. All that will matter instead is the bewildered disappointment theatre-goers will feel walking out of a film they expected to be like Sleepless in Seattle, but that instead feels closer in spirit to Midsommar.

What eagle-eyed watchers of the film's trailer do know is this: Charlie (Pattinson) and Emma (Zendaya) are deeply in love. After a meet-cute in a typically upscale Boston cafe, we see it's — as Bilal Baig so insightfully put it in the CBC show Sort Of — that carefree, uncomplicated "Rachel McAdams love," the kind that leads to arm-in-arm bookstore dates, inside jokes at dance class and impromptu make-out sessions after-hours at the museum.

And as these young, impossibly beautiful — and improbably financially secure — lovers' wedding day approaches, it's all so sweet and easy it starts to get confusing. Is it really possible to make a movie where nothing goes wrong, everyone's happy and things just sort of float along in a sea of bottomless orange wine and fiddle-leaf figs?

The answer, of course, is no. But it's the scale and sudden severity of the "no" that is shocking; it's a brutal, jolting switch-up that comes at a particularly boozy dinner between Charlie, Emma and their best man/maid-of-honour couple Rachel (Alana Haim) and Mike (Mamoudou Athie). 

The jolt comes midway-through a drunken game, where everyone is asked to reveal the worst thing they've ever done. It's the sort of game everyone else at the table knows only requires lightly traumatizing stories, relatively minor transgressions that are just provocative enough to bring out a laugh.

Nothing as beyond-the-pale and somewhat sickening as what Emma offers — a disclosure so off-putting and off-colour that it not only blows up the dinner, but also their friendship, and threatens to blow up Emma and Charlie's wedding, set to take place in just a few days. 

This is where it gets tricky. Because what Emma reveals is truly a bombshell that sets up the conceit to follow, where Charlie — and by extension, the audience — is asked to empathize with a type of person who's among the most difficult to empathize with in the current political landscape. 

Assuming The Drama picks up the kind of attention Pattinson and Zendaya — who also both star in two other gigantic projects, Dune: Part Three and The Odyssey, later this year — typically command, it's certain to inspire a slew of think pieces. 

Serious examinations into how — and whether — director Borgli thought through the implications of asking for compassion for this specific type of character. Questions around whether you should tell stories about these types of characters with this amount of humanization. And critiques of how shallow a movie that fails to indict them is. 

Also, critiques of how offensive it is include this theme at all surrounded by absurdist, uncomfortable comedy — especially coming, as it does, from a director currently at the centre of a controversy for a 2012 essay in which he wrote about recalibrating his moral compass to date a 17-year-old when he was 27.