Sean Garrity’s domestic drama about a psyche-damaging ordeal in the lives of a young couple creates a moral ordeal for the viewer. Its premise — how a single act of rape has more than one victim — is divisive, yet that divisiveness lies not in its end, which is well-intentioned and provocative, but in its means of marginalizing the primary victim for the sake of the secondary.

We meet Zooey and Adam (Daria Puttaert and Tom Keenan) in their bed, in the tender throes of baby-making. Later, driving north of Winnipeg for a camping trip, they discuss their seven-month-long quest to conceive. They stop for a roadside quickie in the woods. Then, in a remarkably jarring bit of table turning from Garrity, it all goes dark with a nighttime campsite visit from two rednecks. Adam and Zooey get a baby, but not necessarily the one they want. Though Zooey is (a little too) resolved and Adam is (a little too) noble in the wake of the attack, subconscious resentments creep in, giving way to deception and mania. What is therapy for her — bearing and raising what might be the spawn of her rapist — is torture for him.

Zooey & Adam posits a fascinating dilemma, the biting realism of which is accented by improvised dialogue and Garrity’s technique of surprising his actors with plot developments. Yet the gifted filmmaker behind similarly cutting relationship studies Inertia and Lucid strains the scenario with a third-act shift that blots out the feelings and voice of one of the title characters, unnecessarily. Admirable in its fearlessness and its technique, alienating in its tactics, Zooey & Adam ultimately trips over its own manipulative scheme.