How much of your past should you reveal to your adorable fiance 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 aspiration 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.

But Borgli shows something ominous in this scene, imposing a psycho-horror style on the romcom tropes. The sound design is weird, eerie ambient noises gulp out to silence, closeups loom and uneasy, dissonant woodwind figures on the soundtrack. 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.

At this point, those squeamish about spoilers or narrative analysis should should look away now, for Emma reveals that as a 14-year-old (played in flashback by Jordyn Curet) she planned to perpetrate but could not go through with a high-school shooting, and that her partial deafness, so far from being due to a poignant infection in infancy as she claimed, 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. It is a denouement that Bret Easton Ellis might have admired.

Emma hopes everyone will just pass over this rash revelation, or accept her assurance that she is perfectly normal now. But everyone is freaked out. They can’t unhear what they’ve heard. Charlie senses their picture-perfect relationship beginning to unravel.

So The Drama is an insouciantly offensive mashup of two American phenomena: the Hollywood marriage comedy and the high-school shooting. Part of its ingenuity is this generic ambiguity: satire or thriller? We may not be sure of the tone in which the secret is presented; its status as a macabre black-comic absurdity depends on accepting Emma’s complete recovery. A female shooter is vanishingly rare compared with male ones, but Borgli’s script pre-empts that objection with examples.

Charlie begins to wonder if Emma’s latent tendency to violence may resurface. And 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.

The film slightly falls down in what it tells us of the aftermath to the non-crime: what teenage Emma did and how she behaved in the weeks and months after the actual shooting that stole her thunder. Charlie is unconvinced, and even compares it to the plot of Louis Malle’s Lacombe, Lucien, but it actually makes a kind of reassuring sense of what she was and who she is, and surely Emma and Charlie would have exerted themselves to tell their friends all this, particularly the horrified Rachel. There is also the ending, in which I think Borgli loses his nerve a little bit.

The Drama has the spiky, ingenious, tasteless style of his previous film Dream Scenario, and both are superior to his unsubtle narcissism comedy Sick of Myself. It offers us a provocation, a jeu d’ésprit of outrage, a psychological meltdown that is more astutely articulated than in many another more solemnly intended film. And it gives us what it promises in the title.