The meet-cute originally of Love Lies Bleeding, a brand new thriller directed by Rose Glass, is good and refreshingly untraditional. Lady meets lady (at a bodybuilding health club); 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 ladies are Lou (performed by Kristen Stewart), the health club’s taciturn supervisor, whose nonchalance belies a darkish, crime-ridden historical past, and Jackie (Katy O’Brian), a muscular exercise bud who desires 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 characteristic movie, Saint Maud, which plunged the viewer into the thoughts of a house nurse affected by biblical visions of angels and demons. Saint Maud’s protagonist was a spindly, spiritual well being aide who imagined her physique elongating and stretching in gory, supernatural methods. In Love Lies Bleeding, which is basically enjoyable but in addition 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 digital camera takes in Lou’s and Jackie’s muscle-bound our bodies with delight however then often imagines them swelling to Unbelievable Hulk proportions, pushing from the aspirational to the nightmarish.
Two movies in, it appears that evidently’s the place Glass likes to maintain her narratives: proper on the knife-edge between fantasy and actuality, continuously holding the viewers guessing over what’s in her characters’ heads and what’s truly 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 factor as a shifty-eyed and awkward robust gal with a coronary heart of gold, yet one more entry in her increasing canon of flinty, difficult lead characters. O’Brian, maybe greatest recognized for supporting roles in style initiatives corresponding to Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, is a revelation right here, matching her imposing determine with vibrant, straight-ahead allure. Jackie is on the health club 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 health club 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 position. Simply what sort of unhealthy habits Lou Sr. is as much as isn’t clear—Glass is extra excited about Lou’s common need to flee him, to show her personal physique right into a weapon as a method of distinguishing herself from her gun-toting dad. Additionally combined 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 finally 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 is just not afraid of lingering on an open wound or dragging out hand-to-hand fight to essentially the most grotesque conclusions. That willingness to shock units Love Lies Bleeding other than lots 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.
