Review: ‘Love Lies Bleeding’ Combines White-Knuckle Thrills with Cerebral Twists – The Village Voice

Rose Glass’s Love Lies Bleeding is a tough little movie that’s not concerned about narrative constraints. Or stylistic ones, either. The film breaks the rules of traditional storytelling to indulge an anarchist-allegorical bent. Lean and mean, this gem utilizes everything at its disposal, including its 1980s setting: Unlike recent movies that take place in the ’80s merely to include period needle drops, this film exploits that era’s aesthetic while highlighting its more toxic, patriarchal values. Reminiscent of David Cronenberg’s early horror films, Glass embeds her themes in shocking, metaphorical imagery, hidden beneath the seemingly straightforward story. And even when her approach feels overly familiar at times, it makes for a thrilling neo-noir with a lot of bumps, twists, and old-school pulp, straight out of a Jim Thompson paperback. 

Directed by Glass and co-written by her and Weronika Tofilska, the movie takes place in New Mexico in 1989, in an unnamed town wedged between the local cowpoke bars and outlying canyons. Lou (Kristen Stewart) is a timid girl with a greasy mullet and a disdainful smirk who manages the local gym, where she cleans toilets and checks in the brawny beefcakes. This isn’t your average Planet Fitness, however. The place looks like a dirty basement decorated with posters, one reading “Pain is weakness leaving your body.” Lou saunters through this sweaty cauldron like she’s about to implode. But it’s not the job that’s got her twisted in knots as much as her grim familial past, which is presented in red-soaked, Giallo-esque memories in which a young Lou helps her father, a local gunrunning kingpin, murder his bound and gagged victims before dropping them in a large chasm in the canyon. In yet another stellar performance, Stewart conveys internal pain and trauma with an authenticity that’s both frightening and electric. At any moment, she looks like she could chew the world in half and spit it out.

The movie’s aesthetic is a nostalgia-laced combination of styles, integrating gritty realism and dreamlike imagery. 

But one evening Lou’s life changes, when a bulky, enigmatic Jackie (Katy O’Brian) enters the gym. With the face of an angel and physique of a gladiator, Jackie lives under a nearby bridge, harboring the prospect of entering a bodybuilding competition in Vegas. The two women develop an immediate chemistry, which prompts Jackie to move in with Lou. When they’re not having sex with abandon, Lou helps Jackie train for her competition by injecting her with illegal steroids that she scores at the gym; Glass exploits the extreme nature of bodybuilding here with queasy closeups of steroid injections and veiny muscles protruding from Jackie’s skin. Meanwhile, Jackie gets a job at the local firing range, which is owned by Lou’s father, also named Lou, played by a creepy Ed Harris. A disquieting presence, Lou Sr. wears a perpetual scowl, collects exotic insects, and sports the mullet of all mullets. 

Jackie and Lou could continue basking in the glow of their blooming romance if it weren’t for Lou’s family, which is breaking apart at the seams. Not only are FBI agents knocking at her door due to her father’s nefarious business, but the physical abuse Lou’s sister, Beth (Jena Malone), endures from her scuzzy husband, JJ (a truly slimy Dave Franco), is escalating to a dangerous degree. Meanwhile, Jackie continues taking more and more steroids, which twist her moods and swell her muscles into harbingers of doom. It’s like roid rage on acid. There’s also Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov), Lou’s spooky ex, who stands in the wings and would do anything to tear Lou away from her new girlfriend. Everyone in the movie is tainted by their secrets and rotting souls. It’s a combustible situation that explodes into a bloody mess.

Some thrillers belabor their plot points until all you see is the nuts and bolts of their construction, but Glass smooths out the transitions with a doom-laden soundtrack by composer Clint Mansell and ghostly camerawork by cinematographer Ben Fordesman. The story can be a little predictable at times, but even when you know what’s coming, the violence still hits. The movie’s aesthetic is a nostalgia-laced combination of styles, integrating gritty realism and dreamlike imagery, and Glass creates a rhythmic tension between these two worlds that culminates in an ending you won’t see coming. Whether or not you indulge the film for its fantasy elements, you’ll still admire its stylistic bravura, equally inspired by Michael Mann’s polished ethereality and ’80s grindhouse movies like Vice Squad and Alphabet City. It’s a fusion of Labyrinth-like illusion and day-to-day realism that never topples into clunkiness.

Breaking the rules of what’s possible in telling a classic pulp story, Glass’s film feels like magic realism on steroids. It’s also beautifully paced, with a propulsive energy that never feels rushed or overwhelmed. Glass is a consummate director with the rare ability to care just as much about the inner lives of her characters as about her visual style. But Love Lies Bleeding isn’t just a white-knuckled thriller, it’s a cerebral one as well. Take the opening shot, which shows a great chasm in the sky. Although this image has literal implications to the story, referring to the canyon where Lou Sr. disposes of the bodies (with maybe a sexual reference as well), I think there’s something more profound happening. For me it’s a void, a black hole where all the lost souls evaporate, a home for the dispossessed.  Perhaps this is a pretentious reading, but the fact that the movie opens up such imaginative possibilities speaks to its bizarre power. So far, this is easily the best film of 2024.  ❖

Advertising disclosure: We may receive compensation for some of the links in our stories. Thank you for supporting the Village Voice and our advertisers.