From watching this neo-noir film, it’s obvious that Kristen Stewart has diverged from her role in Twilight. In Love Lies Bleeding, she embodies Lou, an exhausted but competent part-time gym manager, part-time crime scene disrupter. Lou is a reclusive lesbian and estranged daughter of a crime lord in her New Mexico hometown. In the midst of the grunt work of her daily life, she falls in love with Jackie, a bodybuilder new to town, who frequents the gym Lou manages. Before long, the two find themselves entangled in an all-consuming relationship that begins to fracture as the two enter a world of unbelievable violence.
Rose Glass, known for her critically acclaimed debut psychological horror film Saint Maud, is a director who knows how to capture the bloody, pulpy and wild scenes that fill the narrative of Love Lies Bleeding. She has a keen eye for knowing exactly what should be shown on the screen with unrestrained levels of gore, but she balances the violence well with moments of sensual intimacy from Lou and Jackie’s relationship.
On a technical level, Love Lies Bleeding is pure, visual fun. There’s not a dull moment in the cinematography as Glass makes sure to consistently center a gag or fight or make out session in every scene. When the plot gets more serious, the action still moves quickly, and her lighting and color choices draw attention to the characters and their desperate choices.
Love Lies Bleeding also has killer performances from its cast. Kristen Stewart is equal parts reserved and charming as Lou, and even as she’s cleaning up pools of blood, she’s still entrancing to watch. Jackie is played by Katy O’Brian, who has the impressive physique of a bodybuilder and the acting chops to sell the relationship between her and Stewart’s character. Ed Harris successfully plays an unsettling mastermind as Lou’s dad, and Anna Baryshnikov serves as stellar comedic relief, playing a girl with an unrequited love for Lou.
Despite all of these great components, Love Lies Bleeding starts to lose steam as the narrative progresses. These elements should’ve come together into a more substantial film than what we actually got. However, the script isn’t strong enough to deliver anything meaningful by the time the last scene plays out. The story mostly devolves into a convoluted revenge drama with stakes that aren’t as compelling as promised by its initial set-up.
The absurdity of the violence is simply used for shock value without any real pay-off. The third act of the film is egregiously messy, as it attempts to wrap up loose-ends in a contrived, artificially manufactured way that is disorienting compared to its more realistic, intriguing premise. In theory, the surrealism of the final arc of the film should be worthwhile, but the film doesn’t earn it.
Lou’s character is developed enough that you want her to succeed. She’s hiding bodies and cleaning up murders for love, so her desperation feels realistic. Her relationship with Jackie is consuming enough that this makes sense. However, her relationship with her father is never fully utilized, even though it has the foundations to make her a more interesting character. We get a vague idea of why they’re estranged, but the story would be more developed if we got more than just glimpses of their relationship.
Similarly, Jackie is also underdeveloped. Her obsession with bodybuilding stems from a desire for control, but again, there’s only a few glimpses of this. If there had been a more concrete exploration of her past and her aspirations, her later decisions in the film might have made more sense. Instead, there’s only surface-level depth to a character that has an enormous amount of potential.
The themes of the film are almost as half-baked as its characters. Jackie struggles with substance abuse throughout the film, and this mirrors Lou’s addiction to smoking. The opening scene features Lou driving in her car, smoking a cigarette while listening to a radio station that describes how harmful a smoking addiction can be. Throughout the film, Jackie self-injects steroids, and Lou continues to smoke as their lives get thrown into more chaos.
It’s an interesting parallel, but it’s neither resolved nor connected in an actual way beyond the visuals of Jackie’s needle piercing her skin and Lou’s cigarette twitching in her hand. There’s enough scenes of both scattered throughout the film that it could have built an interesting message, but they failed to deliver.
Regardless of its lackluster meaning, Love Lies Bleeding is a decent watch for those that want to experience a tonally off-putting but still exciting romp. As a queer thriller, it’s alive and pulsating — even if only at the surface level. It’s a feat that a film so action-packed and subversive is also so openly queer, making it a genre-bending work that hints at what the future might bring. Style over substance isn’t always so glamorous, but Love Lies Bleeding does manage to shine as a predecessor to what queer thrillers might grow into.
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