The Killing of Two Lovers Shoots Its Hollow Heartbreak Beautifully

If Jeremy Saulnier ever gets it in his head to make a romance movie, it’ll probably look an awful lot like Robert Machoian’s The Killing of Two Lovers: Sparse, stark and without much space for mercy, even considering the location. The film takes place against the backdrop of desolate rural Utah, a wide open area full of naught but gloom. It’s American purgatory. Similarly, Machoian’s protagonist David (Clayne Crawford) lives in domestic purgatory, separated from his wife Nikki (Sepideh Moafi) and their four kids, who together remain in the house David bought them while he crashes with his ailing father (Bruce Graham). It’d be a lie to say Nikki’s okay with the arrangement, but she’s not not okay with it.
David isn’t okay with it. He isn’t okay at all, in fact. “Okay” people don’t generally hover over their sleeping wife with a gun in hand, aiming first at her and then the man lying next to her, later introduced as Derek (Chris Coy). To David’s credit, he ignores the dictates of Anton Chekhov and takes a powder when a loud noise spooks him, running all the way back to his dad’s home and spinning up a lie to explain just why in the hell he was out so early in the morning. It’s a grim opening. What unfolds from there is comparatively less grim, but nonetheless heartbreaking despite the rise in sobriety.
Machoian’s take on his material is too controlled for the good of his themes. The Killing of Two Lovers is full of filmmaking that upfront qualifies as “good”: Strong compositions, static shots and long takes, all capturing abiding hopelessness in both the nowhere David and Nikki have laid down roots and in David himself. But Machoian keeps such a firm grip over each component of his production that he ends up calling attention to his weakness as a filmmaker, which falls under the “writing” side of the writer-director hyphen.
He’s focused on style at the expense of substance. The Killing of Two Lovers is remarkable to behold, but all the technique in the world can’t distract from the holes littering the production beyond cinematographer Oscar Ignacio Jiminez’s lens. Machoian both has too much and too little going on, laboring relentlessly to show off as a director. He knows where to aim a camera, but the images he creates with Jiminez impress without leaving a mark. They lack proximity to and familiarity with the subjects.