Review: The Killing of Two Lovers Is a Haunting Portrait of Wounded Masculinity

The film’s cramped compositions hauntingly underline the claustrophobic nature of its protagonist’s life.

The Killing of Two Lovers
Photo: Neon

Writer-director Robert Machoian’s The Killing of Two Lovers opens with the unnerving sight of a rugged, intense-looking David (Clayne Crawford) holding a gun over a sleeping couple. No blood is shed, as the sound of a toilet jolts David back to a reality that’s on haunting display throughout the film. It’s later revealed that the woman is Nikki (Sepideh Moafi), David’s estranged wife and mother of their four children, and that the man is Derek (Chris Coy), with whom she’s begun a relationship during her trial separation from her husband. David is obviously a ticking time bomb, but Machoian’s acute sense of place and subjective camerawork quickly make clear that his protagonist’s fragile, wounded masculinity isn’t the only thing ushering him toward annihilation.

David is a bungling, confused man, and his attempts to win back Nikki are undone by his naïveté. Machoian cannily underlines the difficulties that David faces with a fierce focus on his daily routine following his separation from Nikki. David has moved back into his childhood home with his ailing father (Bruce Graham), and in a pointed scene, he mentions to Nikki how no time seems to have passed since high school, since he’s still doing the same chores and on the receiving end of the same lectures as his younger self. We get a sense in these and other scenes that David and Nikki’s agreement to “see other people” during their trial separation stems from a mutual understanding that getting married right out of high school gated them from a world of experience, both within and outside the remote patch of Utah they call home.

All that’s unspoken between David and Nikki in such moments is as evocative as the film’s most conspicuous aesthetic choice: the 4:3 framing by cinematographer Oscar Ignacio Jiménez. Despite—or, perhaps, in spite of—the vast openness of the breathtaking Utah landscape, the film’s cramped compositions underline the claustrophobic nature of David’s life, as well as intensify the tension of his disturbing actions, such as his stalking of Derek with a loaded gun. Machoian, though, never allows the viewer to lose sight of David’s childlike haplessness, which has a way of cutting through the foreboding aura of The Killing of Two Lovers, almost as an assurance that the title of the film won’t be literally realized.

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In keeping with the screenplay’s pattern of ambiguities, we never get a concrete sense of why David so badly wants his family back. At one point, he echoes a sentiment shared by his teenage daughter, Jesse (Avery Pizzuto), that married couples must stay together. But he’s otherwise a man of contradictions, a condition that’s vividly keyed to the film’s musique concrete soundtrack. If David seems willing to kill for his family, is it because he truly loves them or is it because the prospect of being alone and having to take care of himself is too much to bear? Machoian’s boxed-in framing of his story’s oppressive locales takes on a fatalistic quality, slyly illustrating that, regardless of whether David wins his wife back or not, the man is forever doomed to be stuck in the same stifling place.

Score: 
 Cast: Clayne Crawford, Sepideh Moafi, Avery Pizzuto, Chris Coy, Bruce Graham, Arri Graham, Ezra Graham, Jonah Graham  Director: Robert Machoian  Screenwriter: Robert Machoian  Distributor: Neon  Running Time: 85 min  Rating: R  Year: 2020  Buy: Video

Wes Greene

Wes Greene is a film writer based out of Philadelphia.

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