Love Lies Bleeding ★★★½

Our introduction to Lou (Kristen Stewart) finds her cleaning the most disgusting toilet at the gym she manages. The camera almost lingers on what seems to go beyond mere waste, containing perhaps blood and offal. It is 1989, near the peak of the fitness craze that started in the 80’s and continued well into the 90’s. Soon, we are introduced to Jackie (Katy O’Brian), having vigorous sex with J.J. (Dave Franco) to acquire a job at a shooting range run by Lou, Sr. (Ed Harris), Lou’s estranged father. In these first ten minutes or so of Love Lies Bleeding, the film showcases an obsession with bodies and how they are used and abused in a graphic and complex way.

Lou and Jackie start a relationship fraught with sex and jealousy. Central to Jackie’s identity is her perception of her body. She is training for a bodybuilding competition in Las Vegas. We get many close-ups of her flexing and posing to prepare for her competition routine. When she starts using steroids, which Lou procures for her, we start seeing occasional shots of parts of her body growing unexpectedly a la the Hulk. One can easily read the signs of body dysmorphia in Jackie’s frequent daydreams (hallucinations?) about her body and what goes in (and sometimes comes out of her body). She also clearly sees her body as a tool for winning a competition, landing a job, or (possibly) hooking up with someone with the hopes of lodging with her until she needs to go to Vegas.

Kristen Stewart plays Lou as someone escaping some heavy emotional baggage. She resists a liaison with an especially needy young woman (Anna Baryshnikov), partly because she knows that anyone who gets close to her will get hurt, such as her sister (Jena Malone) who is in an abusive marriage with J.J. Her attraction to Jackie starts off as almost purely carnal, but perhaps she sees Jackie’s impressively muscular physique as a sign that she can take care of herself. 

Very broadly, Lou could be seen as the (usually) male sap, similar to Fred MacMurray’s character in Double Indemnity, and Jackie as a femme fatale. But director Rose Glass, who debuted with the excellent Saint Maud, is far too clever to let her characters fall into those noir archetypes unreservedly. Any sense of calculation on each character’s part is undercut by the intense situations they wind up in. Jackie’s crime of passion sees her turning into a literal rage monster while Lou creates almost as many new problems in her attempt to frantically clean up after Jackie. Love Lies Bleeding almost tips into a farcical crime picture, which the Coens are perhaps the most famous for, but without their intense nihilism. These two women care for each other profoundly because they get each other at an instinctual level, even if both characters are practically waving red flags in each other’s faces. All their actions are motivated by desperation and fear rather than more cynical motives.

Rose Glass continues to extend her palette with her second feature. Saint Maud had trafficked heavily in religious imagery and the idea of mortification. Love Lies Bleeding uses violence in a shocking, but never gratuitous way. Characters are confronted with the effects of their violence in ways they cannot avoid, and which Glass also does not want the audience to avoid. The violence ironically infuses the film with a humanity that makes us consider the value of human life even when it is not directly related to death, such as when we see Beth, Lou’s sister, and her dramatically swollen face from her husband’s abuse. Though Love Lies Bleeding asks us to consider some serious issues, it ultimately stays away from moralizing and remains a pulpy genre picture at its heart. Rose Glass seems to have been inspired at least partially by William Lustig or Lucio Fulci, who saw violence and the macabre as major parts of their canvases. But she is clearly seeking an identity of her own by pushing back on male-dominated genres of horror and noir and presenting flawed yet compelling female characters at the center of her films.