Review: Love Lies Bleeding

Director:  Rose Glass

Stars:  Katy O’Brian, Kristen Stewart, Ed Harris

Rose Glass’ brittle palliative care horror Saint Maud caused a justifiable stir nearly five years ago, and now the up-and-coming filmmaker joins the long and storied list of Brit directors who’ve dared to take on the mythology of the American west from the position of an outsider. It may seem like something of a jump from Maud to this, but in the watching there are some surprising tells; ways in which the thread can be seen unspooling between the two.

We’re in the crosshairs where neo-western and neo-noir meet. Quite tellingly Love Lies Bleeding is a period piece, set in the dwindling years of the 1980s (Die Hard has come out, so gun-totin’ rednecks have gone nuts for Berettas). While this works for the picture’s story breakdown (predating cell phones, the internet) and its grimy diner aesthetics (everybody smokes), it also positions Glass’ film within a timeline of hot, dusty, sexy and violent thrillers where lust and violence comingled in the American desert. Movies like Wild at Heart, The Hot Spot and Red Rock West. Glass and co-writer Weronika Tofilsaka make some deliberate turns that bring these pictures (and more) to mind… before contorting their own creation into a different beast altogether.

It’s a wild ride, and not a particularly stable one. Events start slow, then lurch away from the established tone and tempo. A specific brand of humour settles in – almost overtaking the picture – but is used slyly as a tool to prepare us (along with the increasingly farcical story beats) for Glass’ biggest, most bravura break from reality. The most divisive scene here (by some distance) will sort the wheat from the chaff; a bold surrealist gesture that turns the figurative into the literal in a way that’s jarring, euphoric, and singularly cinematic. This writer’s still reeling…

Katy O’Brien plays one of the neo-noir archetypes from the era we’re talking about. Jackie is a drifter; a hitchhiker who blows into a one horse New Mexico town on her way to Vegas, where she intends to realise her dream of competing in a body building competition. Parking herself in a local gym, she meets Lou (Kristen Stewart) and the two women crackle with an immediate chemistry. But rural living is just too damned incestuous, and without realising it Jackie’s already gotten herself messed up in the wider reaches of Lou’s particularly-strained family dynamic.

With an urgent approach to physicality that reminisces on the days when the movies were more honestly horny, Glass establishes and dissects the lust and eroticism between Lou and Jackie, presenting a lovers’ bond that borders on addiction (a motif that recurs not-so-subtly all over Love Lies Bleeding). Knitting her heroines together – and with O’Brian literally bulging at the seams – the movie seems to be asking us to consider whether they are two halves of the same person.

Not in an awkward, derivative Narrator/Tyler Durden way, but in a way that harkens back to Robert Louis Stevenson and the classic novella Strange Case of Jekyll and Hyde. Could Jackie be the missing side of Lou, unbound by morality or restraint? And does Lou tether Jackie in a way she’s never consistently found before? Lou’s never left her home town. That’s an alien concept to her new partner, whose foster background and difficulties with anger management sketch in a persona used to no-fixed addresses.

Interplays of gender are studied, upended and, in some cases, thwarted. Jackie’s bulk and baring are one subversion of genre traditional (if this were a ’80s neo-noir, Jackie would be the denim-clad male lead, bristling with saltiness and machismo), but there’s a greater conversation at play here. It is the menfolk in Lou’s family who are the instigators of violence. Her father Lou, Sr. (Ed Harris) is a bug-chomping gunrunner with a veritable pit of bodies to his name and the (all male) local constabulary under his thumb. Meanwhile, her brother-in-law JJ (David Franco) routinely goes to town on Lou’s sister Beth (Jena Malone) with his fists or worse. Lou and Jackie aren’t innocents, and plenty capable of violence themselves, but there’s a suggestion that violence and its repercussions originate in the men. That theirs is the seed of the sickness that spreads and infects down through the women, who are forced to fight back in kind if they’re to survive. Their rebuke (both Lou’s and Jackie’s, in differing forms) to male-gestated violence is the thwarting.

While Love Lies Bleeding may seem like a step away from horror, Glass’ genre predilections reveal themselves, particularly in some of the dreamier manifestations. Jackie is effectively ‘corrupted’ by Lou, who becomes her steroid connection, abandoning – for love – her au naturale principle with disarming speed. Her journey becomes Cronenbergian, with the arresting imagery to match. Or, if you prefer deeper cuts for your reference points, entangled in sensibilities that lead us to Miike, Ducournau. A professed lover of Lynch, Glass even tries to outdo the grotesque coffee-table skull crack that punctuated the back half of the (similarly dusty) Lost Highway with aplomb.

The emerging comedic aspect of the film may prove as big a hurdle for some as its eleventh hour grand gesture. Having bedding us in with its hard-boiled, jaded, erogenous sensibility, Love Lies Bleeding wanders off track into the wryly absurd and comical, leaving us feeling unmoored and uncertain. Stewart’s comic timing helps steer us, however. She’s a real gift to this picture. Shocked and awed when we are, her Lou takes us by the hand and leads us through Glass’ pulpy, caricature-ridden fantasia of the American west, one carved from the land’s cinematic legacy as much as from it’s living, breathing inhabitants.

But there’s a sense also that the mythos goes deeper here, further back, to the legends and aural histories told by the country’s indigenous peoples. That secrets will work their way up through the earth until truths are revealed. That greater forces oversee us, and maybe even intercede.

Lou just lends the process a smouldering hand.