Lovers of Hate

We can’t say for certain, but we suspect that the idea for this amusing indie came to Poyser while hanging out at the Sundance Film Festival. That would explain the central conceit; Having snuck into a sprawling Park City, Utah, house where his wife and his brother are having an assignation, sad-sack Rudy (Doubek) is trapped by the alarm system, which makes a loud beep every time an exterior door or window is opened. That leaves him sneaking around the house overhearing everything, and we mean everything, that goes on between the couple.

Poyser works the comic possibilities pretty effectively for the second half of this ultra-low-budget indie, even as he induces a lot of squirms of uncomfortable recognition. Rudy laments the way life has screwed him over while his brother Paul (Karpovsky) gets rich and famous writing children’s books based on stories Rudy spun when they were kids. Add to that the crumbling of his marriage to Diana (Kafka), whom Rudy suspects is attracted to Paul, and Rudy’s having a very bad time of it. Doubek holds the film; even though he acts like a jerk, at least we understand his jerkiness. Paul and Diana, by contrast, just come off as assholes, no matter how Karpovsky and Kafka try to lend them some sympathy. Poyser seems to want this to work as character study, but the film is at its best as a comedy milking an elegantly simple locked-room premise.

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