On demand: "The Killing of Two Lovers"

The Killing of Two Lovers, a gripping breakthrough film from the American writer-director Robert Machoian, is nothing if not upfront about what it's doing. In its opening moments, we watch a bearded, seemingly unhinged man sneaking into a bedroom in the first light of dawn, pointing a handgun at the sleeping forms he finds lying under the duvet, and shortly thereafter fleeing into the frozen wastes of a nondescript Everytown. The mischievous thought strikes you: Machoian could easily fade to black five minutes in, having apparently delivered on everything his title promises. (That's your lot.) Instead, he keeps his camera running, the better to study his antagonist David (Clayne Crawford) as he tries to live with what he may or may not have done - there's an ellipsis in that prologue, which hardly reassures us - and to reflect upon the conditions that led everybody to this point of no return; the movie resets, so as to feel out the unspoken tensions lurking beneath the placid surface of a thousand and one towns like this. What we're watching, it transpires, is the fallout from a painful separation of childhood sweethearts who married young, had kids, and then began to repent at leisure. The parties - David and his ex Niki (Sepideh Moafi) - have tried to remain civil: that much is clear from their flexible custody arrangements, the jokes they share with their young offspring, the cheery mantras the couple keep up with colleagues and neighbours. But the more time we spend at David's shoulder, the more apparent it becomes that he's badly bruised at heart and outwardly fraying at the edges. In the wrong light, he starts to resemble one of those oddballs Jeremy Davies used to excel at in those 1990s indies. Here is exactly the kind of nice, quiet guy who characteristically features in dolorous local newspaper and TV reports, the type known for keeping themselves to themselves, until crucially - lethally - they don't.

For a while, though, everything is calm again, allowing us to spot how the violence portended in that title trickles down into the small talk of this script. A neighbour joshes about his plan to throttle his daughter. Niki notes her kids' bonds are scarcely less volatile ("they're best friends one day, and want to end one another the next"). Machoian is unusually alert to the kind of frustration, disillusion and regret that leads to violence - those sorry emotions our indie directors have to bring up, because their studio system equivalents have been told to keep well clear. These characters have just realised they're no longer young, and that they did what was expected of them - settled down, raised a family, busied themselves with work - and still ended up dissatisfied. The danger is that such material begets a doomy done deal, yet Machoian modulates and, in doing so, illuminates: his film, by contrast, emerges as desperately, palpably sad, but also deeply felt and richly human. (In musical terms, it's less the chugging modern miserabilism of The National than a lost Springsteen album track.) The performers are partly responsible for keeping these scenes fresh and our heads above the mire: Crawford ensures David isn't straightforwardly toxic so much as a walking sore spot, reacting to a sudden loss of control over his existence by becoming only more possessive over those around him. What's truly striking, however, is the quiet skill of Machoian's direction, and the way he and cinematographer Oscar Ignacio Jiménez organise their Academy frames so that these relationships are mirrored in the surrounding environment. A colourless sky, such as you only get for funerals; snow on the ground, ice on a lake; a general sense of tamping down, of blood being chilled, lives frozen helplessly in place. We understand why men like David can't move on, because we, too, can't see anywhere immediate to move on to. The impressive maturity of Machoian's film lies in the fact its maker can: consider the longish sequence of father and children letting off fireworks in a park, where a few sunbeams are permitted to breach the field of vision. Only a few, though, in a rare recent American film to merit comparison to classical tragedy; not even a surprising, conciliatory ending can fully erase the quiet despair Machoian sears into the screen here.

The Killing of Two Lovers is currently streamable via Channel 4, and available to rent via Prime Video, Curzon Home Cinema and YouTube.