Gym manager Lou (Kristen Stewart) is introduced with her hand down a clogged toilet. She will spend a lot of the next two hours cleaning up much worse messes in Rose Glass\u2019 powerful \u201cLove Lies Bleeding,\u201d a sexy, brutal, violent, kinetic piece of filmmaking that\u2019s about, well, love, lies, and bleeding. It\u2019s a gut punch about a steroid-using bodybuilder that\u2019s on roids itself, getting bolder and more cinematically muscular with each subsequent twist. A few of the daringly ambitious punches don\u2019t completely land, especially in a frenetic final act, but it\u2019s a minor complaint for a film that confirms that Glass is a major talent with an uncompromising vision.<\/p>\n
Lou lives in one of those middle of nowhere towns that the American dream forgot. Set at the end of the prime of the musclebound hero era in 1989, Glass sketches a remote town in New Mexico that looks like it literally traps people in cycles of violence. Lou has a locally famous family in that her father Lou Sr. (a wonderfully seedy Ed Harris) is basically the town\u2019s crime lord. The owner of a gun range, he\u2019s running weapons across the border, and has been disposing of his enemies in a nearby ravine, possibly even Lou\u2019s mother. Lou\u2019s sister Beth (Jena Malone) struggles under the pain of domestic abuse at the hands of her awful husband JJ (a mulleted Dave Franco). Into this vat of lighter fluid drops the flame that is Jackie (Katy O\u2019Brian), a bodybuilder just stopping off to train on her way to a contest in Las Vegas. She\u2019s like nothing Lou has ever seen. They fall in love, alternating injections of steroids with other kinds of strenuous physical activity. The charismatic O\u2019Brian play Jackie like a literal superhero, getting stronger with each shot of either steroids or Lou\u2019s commitment to her, but her Bruce Banner ultimately has a dark side too. <\/p>\n
At first, \u201cLove Lies Bleeding\u201d feels like a relatively straightforward noir with the outsider in Jackie almost stumbling into decisions that can\u2019t be reversed. It\u2019s been compared to \u201cDrive\u201d and \u201cThelma & Louise,\u201d but there\u2019s also a bit of the great \u201cRed Rock West\u201d and other films about strangers who get stuck in the small town they just wanted to spend a night in. When a shocking and gory act of violence forever alters Jackie & Lou\u2019s relationship, \u201cLove Lies Bleeding\u201d really picks up steam, pushing its characters into increasingly tight spaces from which violence may provide the only escape. But it constantly swerves left when you expect it to swerve right, unpredictable in ways that can be invigorating. <\/p>\n
Part of that comes from the fact that Rose Glass hasn\u2019t made a traditional modern noir. She\u2019s made a film that doesn\u2019t lean into tropes like the femme fatale as much as explode in a new direction, getting more surreal and unpredictable, like a steroid trip gone very wrong. Some of the narrative explosions of the final act will be way too much for some people, and I do think that Jackie\u2019s character gets a bit lost in the haze of the narrative role she needs to play, although O\u2019Brian is a real find, using her physical presence in a way that\u2019s confident without being showy. Glass avoids the potential to go Refn-esque stylized too, edging into territory that could be called over-done but never crossing that line. She very intentionally keeps the film gritty, sweaty, and dirty, which greatly adds to the substance and the stakes. (Major credit to a phenomenal Clint Mansell score too.) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Gym manager Lou (Kristen Stewart) is introduced with her hand down a clogged toilet. She will spend a lot of the next two hours cleaning up much worse messes in Rose Glass\u2019 powerful \u201cLove Lies Bleeding,\u201d a sexy, brutal, violent, kinetic piece of filmmaking that\u2019s about, well, love, lies, and bleeding. It\u2019s a gut punch …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[50,39,37],"class_list":["post-1196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thriller-movies","tag-crime","tag-romance","tag-thriller"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1196"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1196\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}