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Lovers of Hate (Director: Bryan Poyser): I’m happy to use this review to intro­duce a new cat­egory on the blog. Late last month, Netflix finally brought their streaming movie ser­vice to Canada. Sure there have been the expected com­plaints that the very latest block­busters are not avail­able, or that the selec­tion at launch wasn’t large enough, but luckily I ignored all that. There is plenty of great stuff to watch, and hope­fully, I’ll be able to point you to some hidden gems.

Lovers of Hate played at Sundance last January, and was on my radar because it also screened at Austin’s South by Southwest Film Festival in March. I was actu­ally at the fest­ival, and was even at a party with the dir­ector, but didn’t have time to catch the screening itself. Such a small inde­pendent film had a very slim chance of get­ting a decent the­at­rical release in the US, never mind in Canada, so I was very happy to see it turn up on Netflix. I sus­pect I’ll find more over­looked indie treas­ures there in the months to come.

Filmed in Austin and Park City, fit­tingly, Poyser’s second fea­ture (after 2004’s Dear Pillow) is a love tri­angle involving two brothers, a woman and one very large house. We meet mis­an­thropic sad sack Rudy after his wife has thrown him out of the house. The first ten minutes of the film hil­ari­ously cap­ture his attempts to bathe, first at a car wash and then in a stranger’s house. Clearly he doesn’t have much of a social safety net. When his brother Paul, a writer of pop­ular young adult fic­tion, calls to tell him he’s in town for a reading, he con­vinces his estranged wife Diana to pre­tend everything’s fine so they can have a meal together, but the ruse doesn’t work for long. Paul has already let Rudy and Diana know that he’s staying in a huge house in Park City, Utah for the next month to work on his new book, and before long, each of them has shown up.

Rudy needs a place to live and shows up unan­nounced, only to find his brother not at home. After making him­self com­fort­able, he hears Paul returning with someone. The gig­gling woman turns out to be Diana, who’s har­boured feel­ings for Paul all along. Rudy scrambles to hide as Paul and Diana throw off their coats, and then their clothes, to con­sum­mate their long attrac­tion. For the rest of the film, Rudy is resigned to hiding in one of the house’s many rooms, trying (and failing) not to listen to the new couple’s love­making and cri­ti­cisms of him. It’s darkly funny, and each char­acter car­ries enough bag­gage to make the whole thing feel sleazy while not painting any one char­acter as a true vil­lain. Rudy is not the only one hiding. The layers of decep­tion and guilt and regret build, and when Paul finally fig­ures out that Rudy is in the house, he pur­posely chooses not to tell Diana. The camera tells most of the story in the second half of the film, as it prowls around with Rudy, trying both to see and to not be seen.

The film­making is eco­nom­ical in every sense of the word. The single loc­a­tion, spare but effective dia­logue, and shaded per­form­ances of the three leads all add up to a wry take on sib­ling rivalry, romantic decep­tion and the meaning of suc­cess. The excel­lent poop jokes are just an added bonus.

Official site of the film

(8/10)

Tagged as: #sundance10, #sxsw10, austin, independent

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