Love Lies Bleeding Review: A Raging 80’s Romance Crime Thriller in Three Acts
What is the Movie?
Kristen Stewart plays Lou, a gym manager in a rural New Mexican town in the late 1980s, who spends her days finishing packs of cigs, avoiding the FBI, and kicking up dust with the locals when she meets an intriguing bodybuilder named Jackie (Katy O’Brian). Her relationships with her family are all bad news, so Jackie is a delicious breath of fresh air. As Lou starts supplying Jackie steroids to help fuel her bodybuilder dreams, Jackie beings developing an addiction to the drugs and Lou. When Lou’s sister Beth (Jena Malone), is savagely beaten by her husband JJ (Dave Franco), it sends Jackie into a full on roid rage. The fallout of everything causes Lou to have to deal with her criminal Lou Sr. (Ed Harris) who does things his way, a way she’s tried to leave behind that’s now caught the attention of the FBI who’s also knocking down her door. As she tries to clean up Jackie’s mess, things only go from bad to worse to total insanity.
What is this Film?
It’s an 80’s Adrenaline Erotic Thriller, with a sprinkle of fantasy that contrast very well with the muggy reddish tone of the dusty, dirty back drop set by this town. The title Love Lies Bleeding (LLB) is pretty straight forward with Act I being about Love, Act II revealing the Lies, and Act III leaving a lot of bleeding on screen. Director/writer Ross Glass did an amazing job dropping us into this town that seems to have showers but no running water. Hair and teeth struggle here even more than the addicts and criminals they’re attached too.
Kristen Stewart really shines in roles that play on her brooding, nervous nature. Lou is a character that seems to have lost her way in a town that has nothing left to give her but may have also taken everything away from her. Her sister refuses to leave an abusive marriage, her job is running a gym that looks like an oversized garage, and the FBI is tailing her in hopes of flipping her on her father. There’s very little mention of her mother aside from Lou believing her father may have done something heinous to her. The relationship between her and Lou Sr., masterfully played by Ed Harris is best described as poisonous the deeper we go down the rabbit hole revealing their criminal history. A pack of lucys a day understandably should be the norm, and Kristen nails this complex character very well. It’s easily one of her most memorable roles in recent years.
Clearly, the character the camera loves the most in this film is Jackie and Katy O’Brian has one hell of a transformation with this character. Not necessarily physically even with the special fx work for her Incredibly Hulking body, but more so psychologically Katy O’Brian portrays a volatile, explosive, and intense character here that is such a far stretch from the calm actress you see in interviews. The press run for this film was fun with Stewart and O’Brian tag teaming them with fun games that focused on the actresses revealing more personal things about themselves and what It took to build the chemistry together for this film. Jackie is on a journey to find herself, with bodybuilding her north star. She’s very social with an addictive personality and seems to easily hold her own in a world surrounded by gym rats. But in that same world, she is reckless, violent, aggressive, and dangerous.
A stray cat that Lou takes in, the romance with Jackie comes fast and hard in a dark, and twisted fantasy. The highs are steamy and the lows are brutal. Glass isn’t making another Saint Maud here but she’s using the same tools that made her previous film so provocative, and real. The euphoria is just as gruesome and cringey as the reality, while other times it’s floaty and freeing filled with passionate, vibrant colors. Saint Maud did this to disassociate the viewer. LLB does it in a way where the viewer can see the disassociation is clearly with Jackie the more she abuses the drugs. A bold choice from the plot to the mixing of all these damaged personalities, to the character design and makeup, Glass takes us to a place from which it feels like no one who ends up here could recover. So by the end, when all is revealed and the dust settles, you get a sense of how Thelma and Louis could have ended things had they picked up the straps sooner. This was very much an exhilarating joy ride from beginning to end.
Dave Franco has some real balls taking a role like this given how things went down with James, but honestly, he’s always been the better actor. Ed Harris is truly a villain gem. Somehow he manages to look absolutely ridiculous here and still be believably running a criminal empire with everyone under his thumb. I personally think any man who names their daughter Lou Jr is a diabolical menace. And well, when it comes to Jena Malone the film said it best… “Love Ya Sis!”
♦♦
Director: Rose Glass
Writers: Rose Glass, Weronika Tofilska
Starring: Kristen Stewart; Katy O’Brian; Jena Malone; Anna Baryshnikov; Dave Franco;
Runtime: 1 Hour 44 Minutes
Synopsis: An ambitious bodybuilding drifter finds herself in a romantic relationship with her dealer/gym manager, but things truly get hot and heavy when a violent act sends her into a full manic episode and she commits a gruesome crime.
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