Love Lies Bleeding is a lot of things. It’s part romance, part criminal underworld revenge tale, and part sports drama, with a dash of body horror sprinkled in for good measure. It’s also a period piece. It’s a potent mix, and for the most part writer/director Rose Glass and the fantastically committed cast make all the elements gel to thrilling and disturbing effect. But the movie can’t quite maintain all of the things it’s juggling and instead of ending in a blaze of glory, it limps to the finish line.
From the start, Glass douses the film in style; long held establishing shots that keep the audience at a distance mix with quick flashes of entirely black and red images that remain mysterious for most of the film. Clint Mansell’s score comes in as the film opens and feels similar to Cliff Martinez’s Drive score with its throbbing, extreme low end bass. But Mansell’s score distinguishes itself from that score by incorporating a wider variety of tempos and sounds, with moments that could play at a rave in the film’s 1989 setting and, at another point, fast hi-hats that in the 2020s can’t help but bring to mind trap rap.
In this moody and mysterious world, we meet Lou (Kristen Stewart), who single-handedly runs a small gym, and Jackie (Katy O’Brian), who’s just arrived in Albuquerque on her way to a bodybuilding competition in Las Vegas. It doesn’t take long for the bodybuilder to end up in the gym and the two young women to connect. After a sweaty and passionate night together, which Glass shoots with the same frantic excitement of the women having sex for the first time, Lou takes the homeless Jackie in and even starts to remove yolks when making eggs.
Of course this paradise can’t last, and the world outside the two lovers eventually forces the plot towards its bloody destination. That world includes Lou’s sister Beth (Jena Malone, in a brilliant piece of casting as Stewart’s sibling), who lives with her abusive husband JJ (Dave Franco), who just so happens to work for their father Lou Senior (Ed Harris). Lou Senior who knows about the abuse and accepts it, and is also a powerful and dangerous gun runner (explained to the audience in a fantastic piece of montage as exposition).
When JJ eventually puts Beth in the hospital, Lou wants revenge. Lou Senior advises against it as they both know Beth doesn’t want a dead husband, and while Lou struggles with what to do, Jackie takes decisive, stunningly graphic action.
From there the film kicks into high gear and never slows down. Ironically though, it’s in this section that the film stumbles. The excitement and eroticism of Lou and Jackie’s relationship and mounting dread give way to lengthy drug trips and action that’s over reliant on sound mixing for impact. It also splits the two leads up for a significant amount of time, changing the film from a movie about Lou and Jackie fighting together into a more chaotic, but also more rote “crime gone wrong” film, with a series of well-trodden scenes.
Throughout there’s also a thread of Jackie’s veins bulging and muscles growing in Cronenbergian ways that pays off two dividends. The first is frustrating and feels a bit like Glass self-consciously pushing the film to be “weird,” but the latter offers a genuinely affecting moment that may be the high point of the film. Both scenes are undeniably ambitious, and it’s worth celebrating that Glass includes a body horror component to her crime romance film, but its inclusion may do just as much harm as good.
Love Lies Bleeding is a singular movie that falls into some disappointingly common plot points in its final third, but those plot points don’t take away from what comes before. It’s a visually striking film with a phenomenal score and performances that should but won’t receive awards attention a year from now. Those elements make it a success that falters, not a failure with highlights.
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