Let the other guys moon over the forever loves and happily-ever-afters. Hawai'i expats Eric Byler and Kimberly-Rose Wolter know more compelling stories can be found in their roiling wake.

"Tre," the much anticipated follow-up to Byler's indie smash "Charlotte Sometimes," screens at Dole Cannery Stadium 18 at 8 tonight and 7:45 p.m. Friday. The film, co-written by Wolter, elaborates on the anti-romance theme of the previous film with a psychologically intense examination of the real mechanisms behind ideas such as love, betrayal and transition.

"It's not a statement against romance, but the story and the characters imply the truth of what our experiences really are," said Byler. "Everyone makes films about the last, one true love, but 'Tre' is about all the others that come along the way.

Wolter wrote the original screenplay about a seemingly happy married couple, Gabe (Erik McDowell) and Kakela (Wolter), and two of their friends: Tre (Daniel Cariaga), an imposing, charismatic figure with an incisive and merciless wit, and Nina (Alix Koromzay), who is struggling with the revelation that her husband kissed another woman for 10 seconds at a party.

Tre and Nina share quarters (sometimes more) in the guesthouse, and their physical and emotional proximity to Gabe and Kakela set the stage for a course of shocking encounters, including a series of 10-second "experiments" between the mutually repulsed Kakela and Tre.

Wolter, who graduated from Mid-Pacific Institute School of the Arts and took Hawaiian Studies courses at the University of Hawai'i before transferring to the University of Southern California, said the characters are an amalgam of real life friends and acquaintances thrust into impossible situations by Byler's imagination.

"The characters are not bad people," she said. "They're good people who come together at a particular time of life when they are on the brink of transition. We sometimes have to go through things to transition to where we are going to go, and along the way we learn something priceless."

For Wolter, the central relationship between Gabe and Kakela is a telling example of how the divergent paths of such transitions can exist within a marriage.

"At a certain point in a man's life, he has to grow up and decide if he's going to remain one of the boys or if he can find a way to co-exist with his friends and with a partner that he needs to be responsible to," she said. "In the same vein, women are supposed to be anxious to find someone who is gentle and nice and a perfect provider. But what if you find him, and he's not perfect for you?"

Wolter said the character's inability to articulate their conflicts causes consequences, as in real life.

"They act, and those actions are what the other is left with and what they have to respond to," she said.

Byler said the dark undercurrent of the film is related to the sense of hopelessness he felt in the months following the 2004 presidential election.

"The context was that we were looking at the corruption and lies of the government as if they would never end," Byler said. "I think we're seeing now that these people are slowly being brought to justice, but at the time it seemed like lies and corruption were being rewarded at the expense of law, and the feeling was, 'Why follow this?'

"In the film, Kakela begins to doubt the institution of marriage — she's not sure she buys into it," Byler said. "It could have been that she and Tre loved each other but that other darkness crept in. We had to consider if people really love each other or if they just latch on to other people to cope with loneliness and to make the changes they need to make."

Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@honoluluadvertiser.com.