84 min | R | May 14, 2021 | Neon
A husband moves out, agrees to an open separation, and watches his wife start seeing another man. He spends his days being a good father and his nights deciding whether he can live with it. The gun shows up in the first scene.
David and Nikki are married with four children and separated. They have agreed to see other people while they decide whether the marriage survives. David sleeps at his father’s house and drives across town to keep being a present parent. Nikki starts seeing a man named Derek. The film opens with David standing over the sleeping couple holding a gun before he loses his nerve and slips back out. The movie is not about whether he kills anyone but about a man metabolizing the slow death of the life he built.
Clayne Crawford plays David as a man holding a scream behind his teeth. He keeps his voice low and his hands busy, and you watch the effort it takes him to stay calm. The rage leaks out in a parking lot when he beats a steering wheel and shouts at no one. Sepideh Moafi plays Nikki as a woman who still loves him and still wants out, and she refuses to make the contradiction tidy. Avery Pizzuto plays the oldest daughter Jess as the child who blames David for the wreckage and makes him earn every minute of forgiveness. Chris Coy plays Derek without softening him into a villain, which makes David’s jealousy harder to dismiss.
Robert Machoian writes and directs in a boxy 4:3 frame that traps David inside the edges of every shot. The aspect ratio leaves dead space around him and makes a wide rural valley feel like a closing fist. Machoian shoots long unbroken takes that hold on faces until the silence becomes unbearable. The sound design does the heavy lifting where a score would normally sit. Mechanical clanks, gunshot cracks, and grinding industrial noise punch through the quiet and put David’s panic on the soundtrack. The town itself looks emptied out, all gray winter light and bare yards, a landscape that matches the marriage.
The film keeps its tension wound tight by never telling you which way David will break. Every interaction with Nikki or the kids could be the last good one or the spark for the worst one. Machoian understands that the real violence here is the daily grind of a family coming apart in slow motion. The threat in the title hangs over an ordinary custody schedule and turns school pickups into landmines. By the end the question is not who lives but whether a man can survive losing the only role he knows how to play. Machoian answers it without flinching and without cheating.