Starring Max Irons and Sam Claflin. Rated 14A.

Danish filmmaker Lone Scherfig first hit the scene with her international mini-hit Italian for Beginners. She has since been making acute observations of life in the U.K. and shows an affinity for places of higher learning, judging from the retro delights of An Education and the pleasantly claptrappy One Day.

The talented director here returns to Oxford, with only the cellphones and sputtering rage of the idle rich to convey what decade we’re in. Actually, things start in the 18th century, with the founding of the Riot Club, a no-debauchery-left-untried society based on the real-life Bullingdon Club, which claims such rivalrous alumni as British PM David Cameron and Trump-haired London mayor Boris Johnson.

Scherfig astutely defines the basic settings and personalities, boiling the collegiate tale down to a poisonous conflict between two aristocratic scions: confident Miles, played by Max Irons (son of Jeremy Irons and Sinéad Cusack), and self-loathing Alistair, embodied by Sam Claflin (the young Hugh Grant type recently seen in Love, Rosie). Blond Ali seethes with resentment at dark-haired Miles’s easygoing ways, and especially at his dalliance with a proletarian lass (The Borgias’ charming Holliday Grainger), which occasions numerous discussions of class manners. (The rich use napkins, where strivers prefer serviettes.)

When these prize knobs are both tapped for the Riot Club’s latest incarnation, their collision course is intriguing, even if the other members aren’t well differentiated. But the director doesn’t benefit from a script by Education’s Nick Hornby. Instead, the tale is adapted by Laura Wade from her own play, Posh. As the movie bogs down in a gargantuan set piece depicting the club’s annual dinner, it becomes clear that Wade has married the staginess of her original with the aggression of an action movie, mainly to shove its notion of upper-crust twatdom down our throats.

The only thing more obvious than this message, unfortunately, is Scherfig’s lack of interest in it.