The Killing of Two Lovers

The third frame in an eerie suc­ces­sion of intro­duc­to­ry shots in Robert Machoian’s sec­ond fea­ture reveals a man point­ing a gun at a par­tial­ly clothed sleep­ing cou­ple. The trem­bling hand wrapped around the pis­tol and stac­ca­to breaths of David (Clayne Clif­ford) make it almost seem like the film will lit­er­al­ly start off with a bang.

The high-octane stress of the film reveals itself instant­ly, if not through the agi­tat­ed events of the open­ing scene then by the recur­ring nox­ious sound effects in the back­ground, or the con­stric­tive 4:3 aspect ratio that suc­ceeds in box­ing in the char­ac­ters’ explo­sive ten­sion to the near brink of com­bus­tion. With­out the con­text of such an auda­cious begin­ning, the sky-scrap­ing ten­sion mate­ri­alis­es as the kind of cor­po­re­al anx­i­ety whose ori­gins are unknown, but man­i­fests vir­u­lent­ly nonetheless.

Set against the back­drop of the Amer­i­can West, with mut­ed cin­e­matog­ra­phy that evokes Kel­ly Reichardt’s Cer­tain Women, the height­ened ten­sion of The Killing of Two Lovers is the result of a slow­ly col­laps­ing mar­riage of near­ly two decades. David and Nik­ki (Sepedeh Moafi) were mar­ried imme­di­ate­ly after high school due to an unplanned preg­nan­cy with their daugh­ter, Jess (Arri Gra­ham) fol­lowed over time by the sub­se­quent births of her three younger broth­ers (Bruce Gra­ham, Ezra Gra­ham, Jon­ah Graham).

The film takes the con­ven­tion­al por­trait of a mid­dle-class Amer­i­can cou­ple on the rocks, and twists it, as David fights tooth and nail for his rela­tion­ship with his wife to sur­vive, despite the fact that their time apart allowed for the ini­tial sparks of a new rela­tion­ship for Nik­ki, hence the open­ing scene.

“You know, I wish some­body would have told me that it’s nev­er gonna stop. It’s nev­er gonna be easy,” David con­fess­es to his 15-year-old daugh­ter Jess, after catch­ing her try­ing to cut school. Jess, the old­est of the chil­dren, takes the divorce the hard­est, and her resent­ment towards her father for leav­ing is what makes David want to fight hard­er for the mar­riage itself.

Moments like this, though heart-wrench­ing, pull the focus away from the tox­i­c­i­ty that lingers in a cloud around David; these shifts of his between inter­nal­is­ing the con­flict and allow­ing it seep over edge make the film feel less like a psy­cho­log­i­cal thriller and more like a fam­i­ly tragedy that takes itself seri­ous­ly. Addi­tion­al­ly, this scene demon­strates the true heart of The Killing of Two Lovers: the rich­ness of the per­for­mances. Each of the actors breathes life into their roles, mak­ing for an authen­tic fam­i­ly dynamic.

Through hint­ing towards some neb­u­lous, vio­lent mas­culin­i­ty – with an air-tight metal­lic sound design and the recur­ring images of guns and sim­u­lat­ed vio­lence – the film’s inno­va­tion lies in how Machoian pri­ori­tis­es the tan­gi­bil­i­ty of a man’s fes­ter­ing mind over expos­ing the roots, so as to astute­ly deliv­er a hand-craft­ed nar­ra­tive style that force­ful­ly sup­ports the trau­ma of such a high-stakes mar­riage falling apart.