Sometimes it’s the least likely things that can trip you up. ‘One for Loves Sly Bee… Love Lie Bree… Loves Lies Beading… oh, cobblers, one for the lesbian bodybuilding film noir, please.’ Thankfully the people on the ticket desk were sufficiently on the ball to figure out exactly what I was actually at the cinema for, which was to see the new movie by Rose Glass. Glass’ first film, Saint Maud, had the misfortune to come out during that odd inter-lockdown period towards the end of 2020, which meant that it was seen by virtually nobody (as a virtual nobody, I was naturally in attendance). Saint Maud is, as I said at the time, a hell of a movie, and luckily enough people who count seem to have agreed with me for Glass to get the chance to make a rather more ambitious follow up. This is (checks teeth and other bits of mouth furniture are in the right places) Love Lies Bleeding, which is a slightly generic but still appropriate title, for there is plenty of love on display (though not necessarily of the hearts-and-flowers kind), along with copious amounts of blood.
Glass has gone off to the States for this new project, specifically Albuquerque, New Mexico (it seems to be my day to negotiate various linguistic minefields: I got corrected by for spelling the name wrong last time I mentioned the place). The film is set in the late 1980s. Kristen Stewart plays Lou, a disaffected young woman working in a gym which is part of the business empire of her father Langston (Ed Harris); his portfolio also extends to a firing range, the hospitality sector, and running guns over the border into Mexico. Lou and Langston really don’t get on, and Lou is only sticking around to support her sister (Jena Malone) who is trapped in an abusive relationship with her husband (Dave Franco).
Into this rather dysfunctional situation walks Jackie (Katy O’Brian), a young woman who is hitch-hiking across America to get to Las Vegas, where a big bodybuilding contest is shortly to be held – not to be indelicate, but another character refers to Jackie as ‘that beefy girl’ with complete accuracy. Jackie gets a job at Langston’s firing range and starts working out at the gym, where she makes quite an impression on Lou; Lou offers to provide her with free muscle-enhancing drugs from the sizeable stash the other regulars maintain at the place.
Well, you know, it’s the same old story – girl meets girl, one of them starts injecting the other with large doses of anabolic steroids, they fall in love, and then get mixed up in a string of grisly murders and other unpleasant happenings, even before we get to the strikingly grotesque bodybuilding contest sequence. It’s one of those films which manages to be utterly distinctive without feeling particularly original – we’re probably a shade the wrong side of Texas for this to properly qualify as southern gothic, but there are certainly traces of that there, as well as of film noir – this is a film about bad decisions, made in a world of ambiguous morality. It sounds like a departure from Saint Maud, which was a full-on psycho-horror film, but there are still visceral eruptions of gore and body horror into Love Lies Bleeding; this may be a thriller, but it’s a horror-adjacent one, almost feeling like what might happen if David Cronenberg collaborated with the Coen brothers at their most intense.
The other thing it really reminded me of is the game Fiasco, where the players collaborate to create their own story of big ambitions and poor impulse control – the aim is supposedly to come up with something akin to Blood Simple or Way of the Gun, although whenever I play it it tends to turn into something more like an episode of Monty Python crossed with Texas Chain Saw Massacre. I suppose the way in which Love Lies Bleeding so closely evokes the feel of a really first rate game of Fiasco – the characters and relationships are briskly but effectively established, before a succession of initially small bad choices result in the whole situation spinning disastrously out of control – is just a sign of Glass and her co-writer Weronika Tofilska’s command of this particular genre, if horror-adjacent lesbian bodybuilding gothic noir thriller actually qualifies as its own genre.
It probably goes without saying that viewers of a delicate disposition may not find this film entirely to their taste – if the violence doesn’t turn you off, then the graphic sex, gore, and general visceral weirdness certainly will. It’s certainly a front runner for this year’s how-the-flip-did-this-only-get-a-15-certificate? award – possibly Glass manages to give scenes and images such a vibrant, fleshy sense of realism to them that you think you’ve seen more than is actually the case.
Despite Glass’ distinctive visual style, the film really works because of the script and performances, which are uniformly excellent – I’ve been saying for years that anyone who dismisses Kristen Stewart’s ability to command the screen just because she did some teen vampire movies is being silly, while Ed Harris’ status as one of the best actors of his generation is long established. The real surprise is Katy O’Brian, who is not quite the complete newcomer I thought she might be – it turns out she’s done various small parts in bits of Disney-owned franchises in the past few years. She gives a revelatory performance here, by turns tough, vulnerable, funny and frightening, more than holding her own in scenes with Stewart and Harris. I fear that a lengthy stint in the same niche of the genre movie ecology that Gina Carano was so inelegantly expelled from a few years ago may now beckon for her, which would be a shame as she really does have acting chops on the strength of this film.
Love Lies Bleeding is a film which ticks virtually every box when it comes to plot, scripting, cinematography, direction and acting. The result is an involving and tense film with a real cinematic energy about it – not quite as oppressively intense as Saint Maud, but probably more accessible to a general audience. As I mentioned, I think Saint Maud is a hell of a movie; the same goes for Love Lies Bleeding, too.