A woman’s confession on the eve of her nuptials causes uproar in this insouciantly offensive provocation from the director of Dream Scenario. How much of your past should you reveal to your adorable fiancé before the big day? Very tricky issues are probably best avoided in the run-up to the ceremony, but can still be recklessly raised by attractively naive young people who assume the worms surely can’t be that big or plentiful – or difficult to get back into the can.
Such a situation is the centre of this contrived but amusing high-concept, high-anxiety movie from Norwegian director Kristoffer Borgli; a Euro-satire of American bourgeois prestige that sets out to discomfit and excruciate in the spirit of Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure or Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen. Charlie, played by Robert Pattinson, is a rumpled and bespectacled young British art historian based in the US who meets-cute in a coffee shop with the amazing Emma, played by Zendaya.
Dazzled by her beauty as she sits reading, Charlie approaches, but because she is deaf in one ear and listening to music in the other, Emma initially doesn’t hear his stammeringly diffident attempts at conversation, and Charlie, mistaking this for contempt, is mortified. But soon the ice is broken, a glorious love story begins, and the misunderstanding will make an uproarious anecdote for the wedding speech. However, Borgli shows something ominous in this scene, imposing a psycho-horror style on the romcom tropes.
As their wedding day draws near, Charlie and Emma go for a drunken dinner with their friends Rachel (Alana Haim) and Mike (Mamoudou Athie), during which they all dare each other to say the worst things they’ve ever done. Emma reveals that as a 14-year-old she planned to perpetrate but could not go through with a high-school shooting, and that her partial deafness was in fact caused by holding her dad’s assault rifle too close to her ear as she practised shooting in the woods. Borgli invents an exquisitely horrible, cynical reason for Emma backing out: just as she was reaching for the gun hidden in her bag, the school heard that another mass shooting was taking place at the local shopping mall, killing a friend of theirs; her plan had been upstaged and spoiled, so she just had to forget it.
Emma hopes everyone will just pass over this rash revelation, but everyone is freaked out. Charlie senses their picture-perfect relationship beginning to unravel. The film makes the perfectly serious point that there are probably thousands of people like this walking among us: the secret near-murderers who didn’t go through with it and pivoted back to normality.
