Justin Chang

Humor plays an important role in their relationship.

In this scene, Charlie, who works as a curator for a Cambridge art museum, is complaining about a potentially problematic retrospective

when Emma breaks the tension, as she often does, by pulling down his pants.

I did.

I said, if everyone knows he's a piece of s***, then why are we doing a retrospective in the first place?

I love how you always find a way to turn my drama into a comedy.

Most of the drama, though, concerns the kind of revelation that can't be so easily laughed off.

One night, while Charlie and Emma are hanging out with their married friends, Rachel and Mike, they all wind up playing a boozy game of what's the worst thing you've ever done?

Emma's answer is a doozy, and it's the big twist on which the drama hinges –

I won't give it away, but let's just say that it involves not something terrible that she did, but something terrible that she almost did, but decided against at the last minute.

Emma's disclosure stops the merriment dead and throws her friends and her fiancé for a loop.

Rachel responds with particular outrage.

She's played by Alana Heim in a much more ferocious performance than her star-making turn in Licorice Pizza.

And Pattinson is very good as Charlie, a loving groom-to-be who's suddenly engulfed by anxiety.

In the days that follow, as the wedding countdown accelerates, Charlie finds himself wondering how well he truly knows the woman he's marrying.

The problem with the drama is that it doesn't quite seem to know what to make of Emma either, even as it tries to account for how she could have come so close to doing what she didn't ultimately do.

We see flashbacks featuring another actor, Jordan Curit, as a 15-year-old Emma, who experiences her share of depression and loneliness.

But these scenes, which could be a mix of Emma's unreliable memories and Charlie's even less reliable hallucinations, feel like paint-by-numbers psychoanalysis.

And although Zendaya's performance is skillful and empathetic, it's hard to connect her Emma to the younger version of the character.

The movie's premise seldom feels like more than just a premise.