The Times is committed to reviewing theatrical film releases during the COVID-19 pandemic.
He takes aim but doesn’t shoot — there are children in the house — and instead takes off, fleeing in silent anguish from a situation that he knows no violence could solve.
The possibility of violence nonetheless hangs over every stark frame of “The Killing of Two Lovers,” a dramatically spare, formally arresting story about a marriage that’s fallen on rough times.
Niki and David have agreed to spend some time apart, though they clearly have different ideas about what that means.
From the very first shot — a closeup of David’s face so extreme you can see every hair, pore and wrinkle — you might be tempted to pigeonhole “The Killing of Two Lovers” as a brooding study of incipient rage, of the capacity for harm that underlies the human psyche in general and the rural American white male psyche in particular.
But in his rapport with them, as well as his sweetly clumsy attempts to rekindle things with his wife, he projects a sensitivity that feels no less genuine for having perhaps been mustered too late.
Niki, though given less screen time, asserts herself even in her absence; she’s clearly the one who set the separation in motion and is strict about enforcing its terms. The reasons for her dissatisfaction are more hinted at than articulated, but you can read them from snatches of dialogue and other details: financial woes, career sacrifices, a relationship that started too early and has struggled to bear the weight of the many years and children since.
But while David can be driven by reckless impulse — there’s an unnerving scene in which he quietly stalks Derek at the local convenience store — it’s telling that he spends most of his time contemplating, and often abandoning, his course of action.
Perhaps the most prominent of these sounds is the repeated opening and shutting of a car door, a jolting effect that suggests both the tedium of the quotidian and the frustration of a life lived away from his family.
There’s a beguiling intimacy to the way he shoots scenes of family togetherness, especially when the four kids pile with their dad into the front of his truck and head to the park, in a scene as sweet and amusing as it is moderately harrowing.
In the final moments he orchestrates two swift, startling reversals, releasing the story’s accumulated tension in ways that no one onscreen and few in the audience could expect.