Muscles ripple, veins pop and electronic music pulses “Love lies and bleeds” a breathless, hyper-sexy neo-noir drenched in sweat, blood and insect viscera.
If the latter seems a little less expected, this moment, courtesy of a beetle-eating Ed Harris, is far from being the only offbeat provocation in Rose Glass' film, a pulpy, fable-filled lesbian police thriller where bodies, large and small, are ravaged under the starry skies of the desert.
All of this doesn't work. Heavy doses of melodrama and flashy surrealism sap some of the sinister charm of “Love Lies Bleeding.” But this seems awfully close to the idealized version of a Kristen Stewart movie. Stewart has been one of the most electric stars in years. But “Love Lies Bleeding,” in which she plays Lou, a cynical gym worker who falls in love with a bodybuilding drifter, Jackie (Katy O'Brian), gives Stewart a gleaming black sandbox where all her talent can be explored. Obsession, desire and rage find their most knotted expression yet.
Glass, the British filmmaker whose 2019 horror film “Saint Maud” marked an exciting debut, opens “Love Lies Bleeding” on a slightly magical note, looking up at the stars. The camera slowly pans to a warehouse in New Mexico where music is blaring and people are flocking. What sinister nocturnal haunt could this be? It's momentarily disappointing to learn that it's just a gym full of men and women exhausting themselves with machines and dumbbells. Signs around them display slogans like “Only Losers Quit.”
The urge to become bigger – with weights, drugs, weapons, power or, perhaps, love – reverberates throughout “Love Lies Bleeding”. More than once, Glass will linger on the bulging of muscles, almost Hulk-style, although these expansions have nothing on the vastness that Lou and Jackie eventually find together.
Poisons also lurk everywhere. For practitioners, weakness is one. Lou is a smoker but is trying to quit. Jackie is addicted to a bodybuilder fantasy and a mania for self-realization. And then there's the malevolence of the local shooting range, where Lou Sr. (Harris) presides over a corrupt arms dealing empire from behind a desk surrounded by creepy crawlies. The satire of “Love Lies Bleeding” is not coy. A billboard reads: “Dreams, next release.”
It's at the shooting range that Jackie lands a job, after a transactional encounter with a sleazy, mule-bound lackey named JJ (Dave Franco) in his car. “It was magical,” he said after something that clearly wasn’t. The real magic will come later in “Love Lies Bleeding,” but not for JJ, whose abuse of his wife and Lou's sister, Beth (Jena Malone), leads to a series of bloody events that reluctantly brings Lou into an increasingly close orbit with his ex-father. she wants it, Lou Sr.
All of this comes, in a certain way, from the love that arises between Lou and Jackie. It starts with a steroid injection and a kiss, and quickly becomes passionate and protective. Their increasingly close bond pushes them to violent extremes. To be in love is to be ruthless – to your former lovers (Anna Baryshnikov plays Lou's jilted lover) and to your family.
Jackie's steroid disturbance is also a factor, making “Love Lies Bleeding” an interesting corollary to the unreleased bodybuilder film by Jonathan Majors “Dreams Magazine”, without forgetting “The Iron Claw” another beefy A24 film about family rot and building muscle.
Like that film, “Love Lies Bleeding” is set in the 1980s, although it seems more out of time. As things come to a head in Glass and Weronika Tofilska's screenplay, the film keeps an eye open for the grisly events, sometimes adopting the perspective of Jackie's drugged delusions, such as when she flees to Las Vegas to participate in a bodybuilding competition, or getting close to Lou Sr., as he coldly pulls the strings.
But it becomes dangerous to part with Stewart. “Love Lies Bleeding” loses a little of its momentum every time she’s not on screen. However, no one would come away from “Love Lies Bleeding” wishing for less of Harris. He seems to only get better with age, his voice resonates more. As clownish as his makeup is in the film – bald on top, shoulder-length hair – it resolutely grounds a film that resorts to unnecessary outrageous flourishes. (I fear this is an increasingly common effect of today's battered cinematic world – an urge to overcompensate with hopeful weirdness.)
But neo-noirs made with this degree of style deserve some leeway to go bankrupt. As the sign says: “Only losers give up.”
“Loves Lies Bleeding,” an A24 release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for violence and gruesome images, sexual content, nudity, language and drug use. Duration: 104 minutes. Three stars out of four.