Among the many miracles of Love Lies Bleeding, the second film from Saint Maud director Rose Glass, is its ability to successfully walk the tightrope of self-conscious pulp. Tarantino made it look easy, of course, inspiring generations of imitators who lacked his deceptively sophisticated sense of tone and structure (it’s a bit like how Bob Dylan convinced millions of would-be singer-songwriters that they, too, could play the harmonica by using it like a ventilator). But great pulp is a tricky balance: most who attempt it either land among the dispiritingly jokey straight-to-DVD fare which was shoveled out in the wake of Grindhouse, or end up producing something not significantly better or smarter than the schlock to which they’re paying homage. Love Lies Bleeding lies in the sweetspot, reveling in genre excess without ever winking at the camera, and telling a genuine and unconventional love story to boot. This is one unabashedly for the sickos, and it’s the most fun I’ve had with a new release in ages.
The setup is a distaff spin on the sort of testosterone-fueled beat-em-ups which used to fill the mustier shelves of your local video store. Kristen Stewart plays Lou, the lanky, reclusive manager of a desert-town gym in 1989; she’s our Keanu or River Phoenix, the soulful, mumble-mouthed rebel without a cause. Her love interest is the mysterious and musclebound Jackie, played by martial artist turned actress Katy O’Brian; her presence deliberately recalls the early films of Arnold Schwarzenegger, which often felt almost zoological in their awe of capturing such a seemingly impossible specimen on film (O’Brian, it must be said, is a much better actor than Arnold was in those days). The pair shack up as Jackie prepares for a bodybuilding competition in Vegas, Lou supplying her with endless vials of freely flowing black-market steroids. But their relationship is complicated by Lou’s father and Jackie’s employer, Lou Sr. (Ed Harris), the sort of Very Bad Man who invariably run small towns in these films (with his leathery skin and ridiculous mane of crepe paper hair, Harris looks more than a little like the Cryptkeeper; in any other film I might level that as a dig, but here the similarity might very well be intentional). Violence, I should not have to tell you, ensues.
Love Lies Bleeding’s homage to action flicks of yore is near-impressionistic, capturing not necessarily how those films looked so much as how they felt. The scenes in Lou’s gym are shot in a gauzy, tinted haze, as if the film itself was printed on a beer-and-sun-stained poster tacked to the wood paneling of a dive bar you probably don’t want to be in. Everything is awash in slow pans and analogue synths, some from the original score by Clint Mansell, others via expertly integrated needledrops (particularly brilliant is the soundtrack’s use of disco maestro and frequent gay porn composer Patrick Cowley). The film moves like a dream– not a particularly pleasant one, but the kind you can’t get out of your head the next day.
Crucially for this sort of material, every member of the ensemble understands exactly what kind of film they’re in, and their performances are precisely tuned to Glass’s wavelength: Dave Franco as the mullet-and-rat-stached dirtbag who you instantly know is going to deserve whatever inevitably comes to him; Anna Baryshnikov (Mikhail’s daughter!) as the goo-goo-eyed blonde constantly hounding Lou for a date; Jena Malone as Lou’s battered, platinum-blonde housewife sister (Malone deserves just as much credit as Stewart for avoiding “safe” roles and consistently leaning into the perverse and grotesque; her performance here, while brief, threads an incredibly delicate needle between heartbreak and gallows humor). Harris is clearly having the time of his life as the Hawaiian-shirted, insect-obsessed crime boss, and gets to flex a set of acting muscles he’s rarely called upon to employ. And Stewart and O’Brian ably accomplish the near-impossible task of investing this outre material with sensitivity and conviction. You believe in this couple, even as their lives spiral into graphic violence and drug-fueled hallucination.
Saint Maud was a deceptively unclassifiable film, adopting the signifiers of supernatural horror to tell what is ultimately (probably) a grounded story of deranged faith. Conversely, though Love Lies Bleeding does not immediately scan as horror, it subtly invokes the genre in often surprising ways. While there are intimations that Jackie was never the most stable person to begin with, it can certainly be said that Lou creates a monster by supplying her with ‘roids. Like Karloff’s Frankenstein, O’Brian is at once sympathetic and terrifying, a hulking creature of id with few of the social or physical constraints that keep us from acting on our worst impulses. There are a few close-ups that would make Cronenberg proud– some of gooey practical effects, some simply highlighting the strangeness of the human body– and its neon-tinted neo-noir can’t help but evoke John Carpenter (in her early scenes as a musclebound, flannel-clad drifter sleeping under an overpass, O’Brian somewhat recalls “Rowdy” Roddy Piper’s transient everyman in They Live). Love Lies Bleeding probably won’t keep you up at night, but you’ll have to be made of pretty strong stuff not to be at least a little unnerved.
With its bone-crunching violence, lengthy and graphic sex sequences, and general unremitting air of unseemliness, it would be an understatement to say that Love Lies Bleeding will not be for all tastes. But I found it to be an out-and-out delight: a gleefully perverse and cracklingly energetic thriller which twists genre conventions into something fresh and wholly unpredictable. With this film, Glass cements her status as one of the most interesting and surprising directors working today, and I mean it as the highest of compliments when I say I have absolutely no idea what she’s going to do next. Love Lies Bleeding is a reminder that pulp, when done right and executed with conviction, can be every bit as good as so-called “high art”– and that watching a musclebound woman beat the shit out of redneck dirtbags will never not be satisfying.
Love Lies Bleeding
2024
dir. Rose Glass
104 min.
Opens Friday, 3/15 @ Coolidge Corner Theatre and Somerville Theatre
