The meet-cute firstly of Love Lies Bleeding, a brand new thriller directed by Rose Glass, is good and refreshingly untraditional. Woman meets woman (at a bodybuilding fitness center); they strike up a dialog (and begin giving one another steroid injections); they amble out collectively hand in hand (the place they instantly flatten a few bros who aggressively hit on them). The women are Lou (performed by Kristen Stewart), the fitness center’s taciturn supervisor, whose nonchalance belies a darkish, crime-ridden historical past, and Jackie (Katy O’Brian), a muscular exercise bud who goals of aggressive weight lifting. Their romance is genuinely successful—essential, on condition that Love Lies Bleeding topics them to criminality, violence, and even a touch of paranormal physique horror.
That final side shouldn’t shock anybody who noticed Glass’s debut function movie, Saint Maud, which plunged the viewer into the thoughts of a house nurse tormented by biblical visions of angels and demons. Saint Maud’s protagonist was a spindly, non secular well being aide who imagined her physique elongating and stretching in gory, supernatural methods. In Love Lies Bleeding, which is essentially enjoyable but additionally relentlessly intense, Glass shifts her gaze to a small, dusty city in Nineteen Eighties New Mexico, the place everybody sports activities both a mullet, a handgun, or each. Her digicam takes in Lou’s and Jackie’s muscle-bound our bodies with delight however then sometimes imagines them swelling to Unimaginable Hulk proportions, pushing from the aspirational to the nightmarish.
Two movies in, plainly’s the place Glass likes to maintain her narratives: proper on the knife-edge between fantasy and actuality, always conserving the viewers guessing over what’s in her characters’ heads and what’s really taking place. However the place Saint Maud utilized that methodology to a piece of simple horror, Love Lies Bleeding lays it over a hard-boiled crime thriller—a Coen brothers film with out the jokes. The juxtaposition isn’t as clear, however nonetheless, there’s sufficient boldness to hold it off.
Jackie and Lou’s bond is well-earned as a result of the 2 leads are so succesful. Stewart, one of many reigning queens of the art-house American indie, is in her aspect as a shifty-eyed and awkward robust gal with a coronary heart of gold, one more entry in her increasing canon of flinty, sophisticated lead characters. O’Brian, maybe finest identified for supporting roles in style initiatives reminiscent of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, is a revelation right here, matching her imposing determine with vibrant, straight-ahead attraction. Jackie is on the fitness center to arrange for a bodybuilding competitors, however she’s drawn right into a sordid plot involving Lou’s estranged household, an online of ghastly and generally homicidal misfits.
The household’s central determine is Lou’s dad, aptly named Lou Sr. (Ed Harris)—a stringy-haired gangster who owns Lou’s fitness center and a close-by gun vary, and is concerned in loads of extralegal enterprise. Harris, who’s all growls and withering stares, has been known as on to lend his grizzled menace to many a thriller, however he makes an exquisite meal of this function. Simply what sort of unhealthy habits Lou Sr. is as much as isn’t clear—Glass is extra enthusiastic about Lou’s common want to flee him, to show her personal physique right into a weapon as a manner of distinguishing herself from her gun-toting dad. Additionally blended up in Lou Sr.’s enterprise is his different daughter, Beth (Jena Malone), a girl trapped in an abusive marriage to JJ (Dave Franco), whose depressing mistreatment of his spouse ultimately provokes Jackie and Lou into vengeful intervention.
That units all types of dunderheaded schemes into movement, a few of them righteous, some not a lot, however all of them severely bloody and garish. Glass isn’t afraid of lingering on an open wound or dragging out hand-to-hand fight to essentially the most ugly conclusions. That willingness to shock units Love Lies Bleeding other than loads of different neo-noirs, the place cool, smoky restraint is the norm. The ultimate act takes issues into the realm of purer fantasy, a twist which will misery some viewers however that has been seeded within the film from minute one. Jackie and Lou’s partnership is so vigorous, it’s not a shock when it actually begins breaking the foundations of actuality.
