Usually by the time I have finished watching a movie that I am going to review, I generally have a pretty good idea about whether I liked it or not and what I want to say about it. However, I have had Love Lies Bleeding marinating in my mind for several days now and even as I sit down to type these words, I am still conflicted about it in many ways. On the one hand, I do think that it is a fairly bad movie—a bizarre neo-noir pastiche that starts off solidly but becomes frustrating as it takes a number of big narrative swings that utterly fail to connect—and I would not actually recommend it to anyone other than the most ardent fans of Kristen Stewart. And yet, though it doesn’t come together into a satisfying whole, a number of the individual elements do impress and even when it comes to the aforementioned big swings and misses, I found myself sort of admiring director/co-writer Rose Glass for having the sheer audacity to attempt them in the first place. In other words, this isn’t a good movie by nearly all applicable critical standards but parts of it will stick in your mind long after more demonstrably “good” movies have faded from your consciousness, whether you like it or not.
Set in the late 1980s, the film stars Stewart as Lou, a young woman living in a little town in the middle of New Mexico nowhere who works at what appears to be one of the only two points of real social interest, a grim-looking gym where the walls are loaded with posters featuring empty inspirational aphorisms and the toilets are clogged with the vomit of the patrons. Although Lou does not seem to have any problems with the gym’s regular male clientele—her most awkward encounters are with the clingy Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov)—she does have severe issues with the two men who are in her life, no matter how greatly she would like to be rid of them. One is her estranged father, Lou Sr. (Ed Harris, sporting a mullet that needs to be seen to be believed), who runs the local gun range that serves as a front for his gun-running business that the Feds would love to bust, if it weren’t for all the informants who suddenly disappear from view. The other is brother-in-law JJ (Dave Franco), a super-sleaze who works for her father and regularly and brutally beats her sister, Beth (Jena Malone)—while she desperately wants to get Beth away from JJ, she is stymied by her refusal to press charges or even acknowledge that something is wrong.
Everything changes for Lou with the arrival of Jackie (Katy O’Brien), who comes into town from Oklahoma as part of her journey to Las Vegas for a national bodybuilding championship being held in a couple of weeks. After a meet-cute, of sorts, that begins with Jackie effectively cutting down a couple of gross guys hitting on her at the gym, continues with an intrigued Lou offering her some human growth hormones to help prepare for the contest and concludes with them in the sack, the two outsiders find themselves swept up into a wild and passionate romance—the kind that starts off with such intensity that it almost certainly cannot last for long. As it turns out, in the brief period of time between her arrival in town and meeting Lou, Jackie has had encounters of her own with both Lou Sr. and JJ and they, not to mention certain unexpected reactions to the hormones, eventually send things spiraling out of control in an orgy of blood, sweat, violence, sex, betrayal and increasingly strange plot developments, none of which I would even dream of hinting at here.
Love Lies Bleeding marks Glass’s follow-up to her 2021 debut feature, Saint Maud, a psychological thriller about a deeply religious young nurse whose obsession with saving the soul of her dying patient pushes her to increasingly unhinged extremes. (Love Lies Bleeding could have served as an adequate title for that film as well.) That project showed Glass to be an undeniably gifted visual stylist who nevertheless struggled when it came to the narrative side of things—although the ideas it dealt with were interesting in theory, she struggled to develop them in rewarding ways and while she was not afraid to go for broke with audacious and unexpected moves at key moments, she wasn’t quite able to pull them off in the end. In the end, that film didn’t quite work but it signaled the arrival of an undeniable new talent, albeit one who could clearly benefit from a stronger script.
Although it comes from an original screenplay by Glass and Weronika Tofilska, from its practically panting title to the increasingly lurid goings-on, Love Lies Bleeding clearly owes a debt to decades of hard-boiled pulp fiction narratives, both the ones from celebrated authors like James Cain, Jim Thompson and Charles Willams and the seamier examples that you might stumble upon in a darker corner of your basement or attic. The problem is that while the story contains all of the trappings that one might hope to find in a neo-noir experiment, Glass doesn’t seem to have much of any idea of how to deploy them as anything other than surface flash. Instead of rescrambling these elements in new and potentially provocative ways—as was the case of such more interesting takes on the genre as Blood Simple, Red Rock West and The Last Seduction—she just rehashes them in ways that grows increasingly listless as things progress, promising big developments and never quite delivering. Even the conceit that she apparently must have thought would be a big kicker—having the doomed and desperate lovers at the center of the madness be lesbians—is not that big of a twist, as anyone who has seen films ranging from Bound to the recent Drive-Away Dolls can attest.
As mentioned earlier, the film does contain a few audacious choices on Glass’s part that are just as strange and jarring as the ones that she utilized in Saint Maud—you frequently get the sense that much of the running time is dedicated to simply treading narrative water before getting to them. The problem is that while these moments—and I can assure you that you will know them when you see them—will certainly raise eyebrows for a moment or two among viewers when they appear, once the initial shock is gone, most of them end up coming across as a bit silly. This is especially damaging in regards to Jackie, who enters the proceedings as a lively and intriguing character that even those with no particular interest in bodybuilding will find fascinating but eventually turns into a gimmicky construction who exists only to serve the machinations of the increasingly cuckoo story.
And yet, while Love Lies Bleeding misses the mark in many key areas, it does have some things going for it that manage to hold one’s attention, if only for a little while. While Glass doesn’t really get beneath the surface of the noir pastiche she has constructed, she at least knows how to make that surface compelling to look at with the white-trash chic aesthetic she she establishes throughout. She also keeps things moving along at a nice clip and knows how to establish and sustain a mood of quiet menace that permeates everything from the scenes of extreme violence to the love scenes between Lou Jr. and Jackie and gives them an undeniable edge. And even though I don’t think that a lot of the more off-the-wall moments on display work in the long run, I must tip my hat to Glass for having the sheer nerve to take the chance of including them in the first place.
The best thing about the film are the central performances from Stewart and O’Brien. In the case of Stewart, that is hardly a surprise since she is one of the very best actresses working today. As for O’Brien, I confess that she was a largely unknown quantity, though a quick check of IMDb reveals appearances in such things as The Mandalorian and that last bit of Ant-Man foolishness. Both of them are compelling to watch in their individual scenes and when they share the screen together, their combined charisma practically explodes off the screen and keeps you watching, even as the film surrounding them begins to devolved into chaotic foolishness. I also enjoyed the performance by Ed Harris as the monstrous Lou Sr.—while I suspect that this is not a role that will take up too much space in any future Lifetime Achievement highlight reels, he is clearly having a lot of fun reveling in the character’s unrepentant repulsiveness and probably deserves some kind of award for the hairstyle that he sports throughout.
As indicated earlier, I am still somewhat unsure of my thoughts about Love Lies Bleeding. If you had asked me what I thought of it just after watching it, I probably would have said that it was terrible and my guess is that a good number of those who watch it will probably feel the same way. (That CinemaScore rating is going to be brutal.) However, I have to admit that it is not exactly boring and the things that I did like have managed to stick in my mind. The film also reconfirms that Rose Glass is an undeniably promising filmmaker, even if she is still a bit unsteady when it comes to the basics of storytelling. In the end, I cannot really recommend Love Lies Bleeding—I would, in fact, urge you to seek out the current Drive-Away Dolls, which deals with a number of the same ideas as this one but handles them in a funnier and more compelling manner. Still, it does evoke a certain strange fascination at times that cannot be denied and it offers up the kind of unabashed luridness that has been missing from the multiplexes for far too long. This is clearly not a film for everyone but if my description of it has piqued your interest in any way, you might want to consider checking it out for yourself after all.