I searched through the entire database and couldn’t find a review I had written for Robert Machoian’s astonishing minimalist triumph, “The Killing of Two Lovers,” [B+] a NEXT selection at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival that finally got released this year.
Machoian’s film absolutely deserves a review ASAP. This was a taut, tense, and terrific noir about infidelity and rage. It’s the kind of film that used to be what independent filmmaking was all about back in the ’90s, before the big studios ended up snatching the genre away with their slick sublet companies.
The film marks the feature debut for writer-director Machoian and he shows the kind of assured and deftly artful hand at directing that only a high-caliber filmmaker could pull off. On paper, the story being told here is familiar; movies have tackled the domestic drama before, but not in this way. The opening scene itself is a banger — David (Clayne Crawford) walks into his now-seperated wife’s bedroom, where her new boyfriend sleeps beside her, and points a gun at their direction. The screen goes black. We wonder about the ironic title of this movie and if the ‘Two Lovers’ are indeed them.
We are then transported a few weeks back, as Machoian zeroes in on David, a man desperately trying to keep his family of six together during a separation from his wife Nikki (Sepideh Moafi). They both agree to see other people but he struggles to come to terms with her new relationship.
David’s masculinity had already taken a hit in their relationship: Nikki is a successful lawyer and, as he says, his “much smarter wife.” David is rather subdued in his craft, going from job to job and very much a working-class chap who seems to have taken a break to take care of the kids before the divorce hit. In a way, Machoian doesn’t just deal with the fragility of the American family, but the fragility that comes with being a man in the 21st century western world, where gender-swapping roles can be the norm. It doesn’t help that his oldest daughter insists that he mans up and takes back the family.
Shot for $32,000 over 12 days, “The Killing of Two Lovers” has the kind of intimacy that is too raw to explain. Rarely has a film dealt with the fragility of the family structure in such a harrowing fashion. The episodic nature of the film is meant to suck you into its restrained cinema, with the kind of beautifully-detailed humanity that feels documentary-like.
The acting barely feels like “acting” at all here. The reality of life absorbs Machoian’s sparse narrative. Its 85 minutes is the absolute perfect runtime for what feels like the film version of a lonesome country ballad. This is one of the best movies you will see this year.
Edward Berger seems to have settled on what comes next. His Lance Armstrong biopic, starring Austin Butler, is now holding casting calls, with production eyed for January.