LOVE LIES BLEEDING (2024) - Mark Reviews Movies

Love Lies Bleeding, A24

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 14, 2024

Love Lies Bleeding is equally tough-minded and amused with itself, imagining a cast of lonely and desperate people pushed to extremes and then quite uncertain about how to deal with the aftermath. It's a neo-noir of the sort we might expect from the film's setting of the 1980s, when it likely would have been revolutionary (if anyone would have been able to make it and receive even a slightly wide release at the time). At this moment, it's a fun throwback to that era and genre, with an admirably streamlined plot that depends entirely on characters doing what they think they need to do—no matter how bad an idea those actions may be.

The two main characters, who will become lovers and whose sympathetically dependent relationship drives much of the action, are mysteries initially. Lou (Kristen Stewart) has lived in the same anonymous town her entire life, working at a local gym and spending her evenings alone in an apartment with a cat and a microwave dinner. The only family still around and to whom she still talks is her sister Beth (Jena Malone), whose happily—in her mind, at least—married to JJ (Dave Franco, who makes his character instantly detestable), a serial womanizer who's even worse than that.

Into this town—which is only noted as being somewhere between Oklahoma and Las Vegas but is introduced as being what's at the bottom of a deep, dark crevice that's both a central metaphor and a more literal plot point—arrives another enigmatic woman. She's Jackie (Katy O'Brian), a bodybuilding drifter whose sole goal is to make it to Vegas in time for an upcoming competition. She's looking for work, and JJ promises her an opportunity at a local gun club for a few minutes in his car. Jackie takes it, despite not liking guns and clearly not liking this guy, because what else is she supposed to do?

The film, written by director Rose Glass and Weronika Tofilska, is drenched in atmosphere from that first shot of the camera floating down the fissure in the ground, illuminated red as if it is flooded with the blood of lost souls and broken dreamers. There's a very particular kind of logic to this filmmaking, which sees everything at face value, because that crevice turns out to be quite the deadly landmark, and as something from out of a dream. There are flashes of the impossible here, and while those moments might seem to clash with the straightforward plotting and simple characters of the tale, they say more about what these characters actually feel than they can put into words.

It's a sort of emotional logic that's needed to understand how and why things become so off-the-rails. Lou and Jackie meet at the gym, where the bodybuilder has decided to get some exercise in while waiting to make her next move toward Vegas. Lou can't stop staring at the muscular woman, and after she gets into a fight with a particularly aggressive gym rat, Jackie kisses Lou.

Of some note is how concisely Glass establishes the immediate and growing intimacy between these two characters—not only in the sex scenes (which are actually sexy, because the participants are having fun and actively curious about each other), but also in some little details. After Lou makes Jackie breakfast the morning after, the bodybuilder mentions she'd prefer only egg whites next time, and part of the ensuing montage of the two hanging out and getting to know each other includes Lou separating the yolks. Love and storytelling have at least one element in common: The little things really do matter.

Basically, the filmmakers and actors (Stewart plays Lou with an endearing awkwardness in just about every part of her life, which gives the later complications an unexpected tinge of humor, and O'Brian conveys such a wounded and regretful—or maybe guilt-ridden—puzzle of a person) convince us of this romance. It seems as if nothing could go wrong between them, so obviously, a whole lot of stuff is going to have to force its way into their lives.

It's a dead body at first, of course, because the combination of such murky style and the constant insinuation of violence can lead nowhere else. Let's say the former life had it coming. No one in this story really disagrees with that, either, but because Jackie—in a bit of steroid-fueled rage that Glass represents by turning her into a towering, hulking figure that almost fills the entire frame and nearly reaches the ceiling—is the perpetrator, Lou feels obligated to protect her.

The only problem is that Lou has some demons of her own, personified by her father Lou Sr. (Ed Harris), who runs the gun club where Jackie works and basically runs the entire town by way of some criminal enterprise. Not-at-all-dear old dad worries about the attention this body could bring to his activities, since some FBI agents are currently looking into them, and his daughter seems a bit too eager to bring that kind of attention to her father. That leads to a line, stated after a perfect beat and with deadpan indifference by Harris, that could pretty much summarize the gist of everything that follows: "That was really stupid, honey."

Once the gears of the plot are in motion, Love Lies Bleeding allows its characters to make mistakes, to escalate the troubles in front of them, and to be just as lost in the frantic complications as they are in their own feelings. It's a smart way to make a thriller, for sure, and there's something dementedly sweet about how all of that describes the course of the love story here, too.

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