It’s always a test of strength for any British filmmaker to move from the UK over to the great expanse of the US, especially when they make the leap for what is only their second feature. Yet, despite the immense surface differences, the scuzzy New Mexico town of Rose Glass’s Love Lies Bleeding bears a great kinship with the depressingly grey English seaside of her debut Saint Maud. Both places, in their go-nowhere bleakness, lend themselves to gruesome, surreal madness, which took the form of self-flagellating religious fanaticism in Saint Maud, but here is instead channelled into horny, bloody, and amoral mobster thrills and toxic romances.
Set in 1989 (though it really could be 20 years either side of that, you get the impression that this is a place that really doesn’t change all that much), our guide through this suburban desert wasteland is Lou (Kristen Stewart), a woman of limited ambition managing a local gym and sticking around to support her sister. It’s a grim existence (we first meet Lou as she unclogs a shit-filled toilet before being interrupted by her never-seen-a-dentist quasi-girlfriend), but one that explodes into life upon the arrival of Jackie (Katy O’Brian), a bodybuilder with whom Lou shares an instant and explosive connection.
As Jackie and Lou fast become an item, Jackie is also inducted, initially unknowingly, into the rest of Lou’s family, getting a job at the shooting range owned by Lou’s gun-runner dad Lou Sr (Ed Harris) and managed by Lou’s violently abusive brother-in-law JJ (Dave Franco). From here, fuelled by more than a little roid rage, emerges a punishingly gritty crime and revenge thriller, looking at what happens when two endlessly angry people fall in love.
Though the early courtship and sex scenes are visceral and shameless, it’s in this falling in love that Love Lies Bleeding actually falls a little short. Stewart and O’Brian both give committed performances and share an acid-tinged chemistry, but there’s just not quite enough time dedicated to this relationship’s growth, a rather jagged edit making it so you’re never quite sure how much time has passed between sequences. Glass, along with co-writer Weronika Tofilska, is clearly making a point about how the act of falling in love can be a complete surprise, which pairs well with the constant hum of anxiety whenever the film’s in thriller mode, but the result is a central romance that you feel at a remove from.
Glass is on much surer footing whenever the fists and guns come out though, and Love Lies Bleeding is riotously entertaining throughout, whether it’s in blackly comic conversations with the FBI while a corpse sits behind a sofa or bizarre steroid-induced visions (the way the roids alter Jackie’s body is handled remarkably, like if a Hulk movie went real body-horror). Harris, wearing one of the most brilliantly hideous wigs I’ve maybe ever seen in a movie, makes for a powerful villain, and also brings out the best in Stewart’s performance. Most of the time she flits somewhere between cockily disinterested and actively commanding, but in Harris’s presence, suddenly her Lou is a frightened teenager, stumbling over words and hitting a higher speaking register. They make for a fantastically well-acted duo, years of history and power dynamics coming out without the need for any exposition.
Just like its trapped-by-circumstance characters, Love Lies Bleeding needs just a little bit more room to breathe, to let the romance stand proud next to all the grotesquery and cynicism that always threatens to overpower it. Within its claustrophobic confines, though, (Glass does a great job of making the vast New Mexico desert still *feel* suffocatingly small in this miserable town), it moves like a rocket and hits like a furious gym rat seeing red.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 