‘Love Lies Bleeding’ movie review: A blood-soaked, blackly hilarious thriller that never loses sight of romance
It’s hard to quantify a film as singular as Rose Glass’ Love Lies Bleeding as being one thing in particular, but even though the propulsive thriller moves through several different genres and displays an effortless knack for mastering all of them, it never loses sight of the love story at its core.
In the barest sense, the film is about the budding romance between Kristen Stewart’s introverted, fiercely protective gym manager Lou and Katy O’Brian’s Jackie, a drifter who shows up from out of nowhere with dreams of making it big in the world of bodybuilding. The two are instantly smitten with each other, but that’s only one small cog in the riveting, stylish, and mesmerising machine crafted by Glass.
As tends to be the case in a small town, though, all of the main characters are connected to everybody else. Lou’s father, Lou Sr, an enigmatic Ed Harris with sinister eccentricities and a ludicrous wig who owns the local shooting range, which he uses as a front for his illicit operations.
Jackie gets a job there after sleeping with Dave Franco’s sleazeball JJ, who happens to be the violent scumbag husband of Jena Malone’s Beth, the sister Lou has effectively paused her own life to try and ensure she manages to survive her physically and emotionally traumatising marriage.
After they fall for each other, Lou and Jackie ignite a chain of events that threatens to swallow everyone and everything in their orbit, with the feds hovering ominously overhead as the former does her best to try and help the latter in achieving her dreams, despite her own flesh and blood providing the most significant stumbling block towards happiness.
Accepting the offer of chemical assistance, ‘roid rage’ becomes less of a cliché as it applies to Jackie and more of a tightly-balled coil or rage ready to unspool at any second. When the steroids kick in, Glass zeroes in on O’Brian’s remarkable physique and begins to shift like something out of a body horror movie to signal the alterations in her brain chemistry, something that gradually becomes more pronounced throughout the film.
Love Lies Bleeding is a compelling and multi-layered story, blending elements of love, violence, conspiracy, revenge, and dark comedy. The dynamic between Stewart and O’Brian adds depth to the narrative, while the portrayal of a small town engulfed in a generation-spanning conspiracy adds intrigue. The inclusion of humour, albeit dark, provides a balance to the more intense moments, making for an engaging and unpredictable storyline.
Aided immeasurably by Clint Mansell’s intoxicating score and Ben Fordesman’s eye-popping cinematography that paints the arid backdrops as either heaven or hell depending on the situation, Love Lies Bleeding is the assured and confident work of a director who knows exactly what they want and how they want to accomplish it, creating a genre-hopping noir drenched in blood, sweat, tears, and style.
Stewart’s expressive turn is to be expected of an actor of her calibre, and the same sentiment extends to tried-and-trusted hands like Harris and Franco, leaving O’Brian as the showstopping revelation of the piece. Jackie’s physicality is only one aspect of her character, and while the former police officer has that in spades, she proves herself to be a formidable dramatic talent in a breakthrough role that runs the emotional gamut from lust and new romance to distrust, mania, and borderline hysteria. If Love Lies Bleeding doesn’t have casting agents banging down her door to offer her major roles from here on out, then something has gone terribly awry.
Jackie and Lou bring out the best in each other, but the often-torturous nature of love ensures that it has the potential to bring out the worst, too. They can’t escape their feelings for each other, and in an ideal world, they wouldn’t even try, but the hands of fate do a compelling job of driving them apart nonetheless through circumstances out of their control and entirely of their own making.
Tense, hilarious, bleak, gruesome, passionate, nail-biting, and excruciating at points – often in the space of a single scene – Love Lies Bleeding is an audaciously exhilarating feature that finds Glass and her cast firing on all cylinders, and it’s a film that won’t be forgotten easily after witnessing its outstanding endgame unfold while perched squarely on the edge of the seat.
