Love Lies Bleeding

The writer-director Rose Glass, who introduced herself five years ago with the well-regarded horror film Saint Maud, has a knack for setting up a suggestive yet oppressive mood. She was built, really, for film noir, and her latest, Love Lies Bleeding, has steamy moments and genuinely horrifying violence. In both films, though, she can’t quite stick the landing and some of the more hallucinatory passages risk bad laughter. That’s the trouble with movies as serious as Glass’s are — she doesn’t release our laughter with any comic relief, so it has to be released somehow, and it happens when our protagonist’s fantasies are made absurdly literal. Any more detail would be spoiling part of the big finish. 

I enjoyed Love Lies Bleeding more than Saint Maud, but I’m not eager to watch either of them again. Our heroine, Louise or “Lou” (Kristen Stewart), staggers under the weight of the world. A gym manager, Lou likes women but seems to have attracted only bad news like Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov), who is hyperactive and needy in a way that screams drugs, or just desperate loneliness. Soon enough, Lou meets Jackie (Katy O’Brian), a hopeful bodybuilder, and falls in love with her. Jackie seems nice but a little flighty; her instability spikes when she gets hooked on steroids Lou gives her. Jackie happens to have landed work at a shooting range owned by Lou’s dad (Ed Harris), a bad motorscooter who uses the range as a front for gunrunning and has left many bodies at the bottom of a ravine. 

That’s not all. Lou’s beloved sister Beth (Jena Malone) is stuck in an abusive relationship with J.J. (Dave Franco), who puts Beth in the hospital one day. Venting her anger, Lou says she wants J.J. dead, and Jackie hears and goes to visit J.J. in a spiral of roid rage. During all this, the feds are sniffing around; they’d like to nail Lou’s dad for all the bodies in the ravine, plus a new one found down there. For a while, I was with the movie as a sort of artful mirage of passion, in which Lou’s desires are answered by Jackie the leonine figure of mystery. Where did she come from? What does she want? It’s all kind of abstract. As if that weren’t enough stress, Lou is trying to quit smoking during all this. Good luck with that.

It’s capably acted — this deserves to be Katy O’Brian’s breakout role, allowing her to explore pleasure and pain and fear and madness, and Stewart has some fine, truthful moments. Her Lou grounds the sometimes strange film in lucidity and gives us someone to relate to. When these two make each other smile, they create a pocket of warmth we don’t want to lose, even though this is a noir and we know a storm is on the horizon. There’s a troublesome, though most likely unintentional, subtext wherein the mixed-race Jackie enters the pale Lou’s life and behaves savagely. Again, noirs are not nice. But it’s tricky to create characters we’re meant to care about, and cast actors who can make us care, and then shove them into the meat grinder of noir, where by definition everything turns to pulp.

Pulp, of course, can be fun. But Rose Glass has now made a horror movie and a noir, both genres that can offer a terrific time, and dipped them in a thick, forbidding mood. Jackie’s two major trippy sequences seem to signify more than is there; they pop in for a surreal twinkle, then are gone and unremarked on. Yet this kind of emotionally fuzzy psychodrama, which feels palpably physical but relentlessly interiorized, can poke us in raw places that other movies can’t get at. Someday Glass will find a story that consorts well with her dread-ridden tone, and she will make a classic that even I, who feels emotionally adrift in her films to date, will have to acknowledge. I’m also willing to note that the problem could be more mine than hers; something in my store of emotions and responses gets put off by what she’s doing or what she’s trying. That doesn’t make it bad. It certainly doesn’t make it boring.

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