BBritish director Rose Glass lets you rip with some pure roid-jare cinema in this loud, gruesomely violent and deadly intelligent noir thriller set in a Venn diagram of overlapping bodybuilding, murder, and sex. The number of corpses grows so alarmingly that the heroes are in danger of running out of carpets in which to roll the corpses.
Glass has assembled a great cast – but it has to be first among equals Kristen Stewart who gives an excellent performance as a gym manager and nervous nicotine addict Lou involved in a love affair. Why don’t we talk more or actually all the time about what a great actress Stewart is? Her snappy, “No!” in a tense situation, and therefore refusing to allow herself to smoke a cigarette from an errant packet, is one of the funniest lines of the year.
Love Lies Bleeding channels Elmore Leonard in his gritty tale of forbidden love, chaotic crime, and ugly random characters with bad hair and bad attitudes, but Glass and her co-writer Veronica Tofilska playfully give us some Jonathan Swift in that Gulliver’s Travels airs on television in one shot, and then gives us a surreal Brobdingnagia freakout in the climactic confrontation.
It’s set in a New Mexico desert town—a Breaking Bad-type landscape riddled with dangerous ravines—and the date is 1989, though you might not notice the absence of smartphones until news of the Berlin Wall breaks in one scene. Lou works at a gym whose walls are plastered with two types of posters: those that disclaim legal liability for equipment-related injuries, and those that tell you to push yourself because pain is just weakness leaving the body. Unfortunately, many characters have to experience this other and more common type of pain, which is weakness entering the body.
Lou’s life revolves around mundane workplace tasks like unclogging toilets, but is suddenly exalted by a flash of love. A new client named Jackie (Cathy O’Brien) passes by on her way to the Las Vegas bodybuilding championships: ripped, toned and devastatingly sexy. They fall in love and Lou fatefully introduces Jackie to steroids. Meanwhile, federal agents question Lou’s estranged father Lou Sr. (Ed Harris), and Lou and Jackie seethe with anger over the way Lou’s sister Beth (Jenna Malone) has been beaten by her loathsome husband JJ (Dave Franco), whom payback is on its way.
For a film as far-fetched as this, it might be counterintuitive to talk about subtlety, but Stewart really is; her line readings are coolly calibrated, questioning, restrained, sometimes infinitely double-takes on the strange or outrageous things happening in front of her. Her lack of an obvious answer is due to the fact that she herself is much tougher than we imagined. Harris is terrifying as Lou Sr., a gun club manager and insect enthusiast who also owns a jolly large hacienda that includes a portrait of him and Lou’s stepmother. This could be a new grindhouse classic; in this world love bleeds but takes nothing lying down.
