UK/US | 2024 | Directed by Rose Glass
Logline: A gym manager falls for a bodybuilder passing through town, but her own family’s dark history gets in the way of the romance.
Following up a debut feature as powerful, striking, and original as Saint Maud is a tough act to follow, but Rose Glass gives it a damn good shot. Love Lies Bleeding plays with the tropes and conventions of neo-noir, and, for the most part, deftly handles the genre’s most effective elements. Yet while Saint Maud was a richly detailed, atmospheric study of madness and obsession with a singular perspective, an extraordinary character arc, and a powerhouse ending, Love Lies Bleeding plays most of its cards straight, toys with familiarity, infused with a sly blend of retro and modern sensibilities (it’s soon apparent the movie is set in the 80s, but with today’s fashion it could easily be now), only pulling the rug in the last ten minutes, but boy, that carpet is yanked hard.
Kristen Stewart, in a role she no doubt relished, plays Lou, a reclusive, chain-smoking - though she really wants to quit - manager of a shitty New Mexico warehouse gym on the outskirts of town. Big wall slogans remind its members that pain is weakness leaving the body. It’s here that Jackie (Katy O’Brian), a hardbody with her sights set on a Las Vegas body-building competition, swings by. She’s been living rough, and enduring compromising positions for rides. Running from the past and chasing one’s dreams can be a dirty business, and for Jackie, it’s about to get a whole lot dirtier.
Lou and Jackie hit off immediately. But Jackie has already taken a job at the local firing range, much to Lou’s chagrin, since it’s her psycho dad (Ed Harris in ridiculous hair extensions and chewing the scenery like tobacco) who runs it, and her sister’s scumbag husband, JJ (Dave Franco), who got Jackie the gig. Older sis Beth (Jena Malone) has long suffered physical abuse at the hands of JJ, but is trapped in a pathetic, co-dependent relationship, blind (almost literally due the beatings!) to the loveless marriage. Lou’s had enough of what she’s seen. Straw’s about to break the camel’s back.
Glass co-wrote the screenplay with Weronika Tofilska, an ex-pat Polish filmmaker who studied at Krzysztof Kieslowki’s film school, and directed a segment on a 2015 straight-to-video anthology A Moment of Horror, of which Glass also directed a segment. The visual stylistics Glass employs are reminiscent of Nicholas Winding Refn, but overall the movie is more like the Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple, John Dahl’s Red Rock West, and Oliver Stone’s U-Turn, where flawed, but likeable characters quickly get out of their depths trying to fix themselves an exit, and the faster they try to dig their way out, the deeper they slide in, and the more dirt they pull in around themselves.
Love Lies Bleeding is an enthralling, entertaining movie, that while offering nothing that original in terms of plotting, still feels fresh with its use of sourced music (the sexually-fluid, electro-funk of Nona Hendryx’s “Transformation” and Gina X Performance’s “Nice Mover” feature early in the piece) and Clint Mansell’s excellent score. The characters are well-etched, all of them beautifully performed, especially Stewart and O’Brian in the central roles. Anna Baryshkinov’s small part as filthy, lost soul Daisy is a scene-stealing hoot, yet it’s a shame to see Jena Malone in such a tiny, almost thankless role.
For almost the entire movie Glass has fashioned a pumped-up, straight-down-the-barrel, erotically-charged crime caper, but suddenly, as the audience anticipates an explosive confrontation in the movie’s last ten minutes, the entire tone of the movie is turned on its head, with a radical shift into fantasy and finally in the movie’s last scene petering out into overt black comedy (although an absurdist sense of humour is prevalent throughout). It feels as though Glass and Tofilska didn’t quite know how to end the story and chose to wrap it up in a hasty, extravagant folly with a deadpan epilogue tagged on the end.
The sudden shift is a bold, deliberately metaphorical injection that will no doubt frustrate many viewers, but if you’re prepared to embrace it, then perhaps it can be interpreted as some kind of transgressive liberation, but it didn’t deliver the kind of thrilling, violent dénouement I was anticipating. Still, even if the ending wasn’t quite what I wanted – and I doubt anyone will be able anticipate it - Love Lies Bleeding is a sweaty, fun lil’ thriller, and a terrific sophomore feature for Glass.