Film Review - Love Lies Bleeding
Kristen Stewart and Katie O'Brien are both excellent in Rose Glass's gripping lesbian neo-noir crime thriller
Unlike the recent lamentable pseudo-parody Drive Away Dolls, Love Lies Bleeding is a lesbian neo-noir crime thriller that features genuinely interesting characters and a properly taut narrative. Director Rose Glass’s debut film Saint Maud (2020) proved an outstanding psychological horror gem, but this is an even more visually confident work. It also features a great pair of leads in Kristen Stewart and Katie O’Brien.
In a small New Mexico town, circa 1989, gym manager Louise “Lou” Langston (Stewart) meets Jaqueline “Jackie” Cleaver (O’Brien); a young drifter with dreams of winning a Las Vegas bodybuilding competition. They fall in love, and Lou lets Jackie stay at her apartment. In between sex and steroid shooting, Jackie gets a job at a shooting range run by Lou’s estranged father, Lou Langston Snr (Ed Harris with the most frightening hair this side of Peter Stringfellow). Lou Snr also smuggles guns as a side business, attracting the attention of the FBI, though so far, they’ve been unable to prove anything, as witnesses who talk to them invariably disappear.
Complications concerning Lou’s sister Beth (Jenna Malone) and her abusive husband JJ (Dave Franco), who also works for Lou Snr, propel the narrative into darker territory. Things soon get violent, with misunderstandings, murder, and more murder threatening to tear Lou and Jackie apart. In the meantime, the FBI are tightening their grip. Can Lou and Jackie escape the tangled web?
Glass has a remarkable eye for the physicality of the human body. For example, an opening scene in a gym features an arresting set of furrowed brows, sweating chests, muscular close-ups, and bulging veins, much of it steroid-induced. Given the popularity of steroids in the 1980s gym scene, the film does a great job of showing both the exhilaration and the frightening “roid-rage” side effects. Despite plenty of dodgy moustaches and bad haircuts, the 1980s setting isn’t used for cheap nostalgia points, especially given the nasty, brutish atmosphere in and around the dead-end town that Lou longs to escape (she stays primarily for her sister).
Performances are great across the board. Kristen Stewart has long since won me over in her diverse portfolio of excellent post-Twilight saga roles — Still Alice (2014), Personal Shopper (2016), Spencer (2021), and Crimes of the Future (2022), for instance — and here, she brings unexpected subtlety, considering the melodramatic subject matter. Stewart also enhances the vein of deadpan dark comedy, with her attempt to give up cigarettes leading to a big laugh in one of the most intense moments of the film. In the supporting cast, Dave Franco is suitably unpleasant, Ed Harris is flat-out terrifying, and there’s a good part for Anna Baryshnikov as Daisy; a local lesbian utterly obsessed with Lou. Daisy plays a pivotal role in the story, and one gets the impression that Lou has taken advantage a little, perhaps given her lack of partner options in the small town.
As for Katie O’Brien, she manages to bring both vulnerability and convincing strength to her character. Although more than able to handle herself in physical conflict, she’s not the clear-thinker Lou is, and the steroids make her far more volatile. As such, she proves riveting to watch, dominating the screen, even when the film takes a couple of surreal left turns into pseudo-Cronenbergian body horror territory. That may seem an odd choice to some viewers, but for me, given the drugs involved, the fantastical leaps in Glass and co-writer Weronika Tofilska’s screenplay felt appropriate.
Yes, this is massively over-the-top, but all things considered, Love Lies Bleeding is a wholly gripping, sweaty, subversive piece of work that holds the attention throughout. It won’t be for everyone, but if you see just one lesbians-on-steroids neo-noir crime thriller this year, make sure it’s this one.
(Originally published at Medium.)
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Sounds like a kind of modern film noir, with a unique 21st century sexual twist.
Caught this earlier in the week and was really enjoying it up to the strange "super-size" event at the end. I know it was supposed to be hallucinatory but Lou wasn't the one on drugs so I didn't get it and it kind of spoilt the film with a huge blob of nonsense. As someone who knows more about this sort of thing than I, what did you get out of this scene ?