Directed by: Rose Glass
Written by: Rose Glass and Weronika Tofilska
Starring: Kristen Stewart, Katy O'Brian, and Ed Harris
Runtime: 104 minutes
Kristen Stewart becomes the queer icon of the internet’s dreams in ‘Love Lies Bleeding’
One shouldn’t need much prompting to buy a ticket to see a mulleted Kristen Stewart in a muscle shirt lay waste to bad men with her hot bodybuilder girlfriend in a dirtbag lesbian noir. If that alone doesn’t sell you on the potential of cinema as an artform, I don’t know that a review is going to move the needle in your soul.
But just in case: “Love Lies Bleeding” rules and gives Stewart a worthy platform to be the queer icon of the internet’s dreams
The sophomore effort from British director Rose Glass (who helmed the God-haunted if undercooked 2019 horror film “Saint Maud”) is a geyser of female strength and rage. It’s a grime-slick riot, a confluence of pain and pleasure in which violence pulses under the neon-light surface like a bulging vein surging with steroids.
Stewart is instantly winning as Lou, a louche, glassy-eyed muscle-gym manager in a dead-end desert town we first meet unclogging a toilet while sweaty, aggro men do reps underneath motivation signs like “Pain is weakness leaving the body” and “The body achieves what the mind believes.”
There’s not much for a girl like Lou in a place like this, and so it doesn’t take much prompting for her to fall hard for new arrival Jackie (Katy O’Brian), a mesmerizingly buff hitchhiker stopping for a spell on her way to a body-building competition in Las Vegas. Jackie’s only there to pump iron and stash tips from her new job waitressing at a gun range. But a hookup with Lou turns into a 24-hour-sleepover and – improbably, beautifully in Ronald Reagan’s America, when this is set – something that with the help of a few ravenous sex scenes starts to look like a serious relationship.
But there’s rot underneath the spangly unitards and jeweled glow of neon gym signs. Jackie’s hitched her way into a domestic drama that’s about to explode, leaving bodies in its wake.
“Love Lies Bleeding” recalls nothing so much as Kathryn Bigelow’s neo-Western vampire classic “Near Dark.” There are no fangs here, but instead a She-Hulk waiting to be unleashed. Like Bigelow before her, Glass has filled her dusty dead-end Southwestern town with memorable characters and their violent delights. A gaunt, nefarious Ed Harris (whose skinny face, balding pate and long, pale tendrils of hair make him look like the Crypt Keeper) runs guns and keeps tabs on his estranged daughter, Lou. A porn-stached Dave Franco serves as his henchman, playing the abusive husband of Lou’s battered sister, Beth (Jena Malone).
It's a powder keg waiting to go off, and Jackie is the match.
Not all the film’s big swings clear the fence, but Glass’ ambition, matched by powerhouse performances from Stewart and O'Brian, marks a striking leap forward in the young director’s artistic vision. “Love Lies Bleeding” is a tonal tightrope-walk, a pas de deux of seriousness and silliness, tenderness and profanity, pleasure and pain, with a dash of the supernatural. It’s slicked in effluvia, packed with sweaty closeups of pained bodies. Sucking turns into biting, caresses into grips as Lou and Jackie fight – sometimes with each other – for liberation and self-determination that will take more than physical strength.
“The body achieves what the mind believes” isn’t some cliché platitude after all. In “Love Lies Bleeding,” it’s a promise.
Barbara’s ranking
3.5/4 stars
