LOVE LIES BLEEDING is an unusually cool lesbian neo-noir from director Rose Glass (SAINT MAUD), who co-wrote it with Weronika Tofilska. It’s vaguely in the tradition of all my favorite dusty desert town crime movies, and the ones about passionate young couples on the run from bad choices or circumstances, but it has its own secret recipe of transgression, poetry and lovestruck naivete.
It comes at you with a wave of atmosphere, opening deep inside a chasm, rising up to look at the bright stars in the sky above New Mexico, then craning down to the Crater Gym, a big rectangular warehouse of sweat and dirt that might as well be a barn. It’s surprisingly active at night. High concentration of muscle heads in this barren town, I guess. Kristen Stewart (CRIMES OF THE FUTURE) stars as the manager of the gym, Lou, who’s introduced reaching deep into a plugged toilet. I had to do that working at a grocery store as a teenager, ‘cause I didn’t have a manager like Lou. Mine wouldn’t do it herself, she called the new kid and said, “Sorry to say, sug, the only thing to do is reach in there and pull it out.”
Even with this unglamorous entrance, Stewart continues her run as a Real Deal Movie Star, popping off the screen with her idealized mullet and sleeveless shirt, holding her head high for this literally shitty job, breaking up fights between jocks and fending off solicitations from someone she doesn’t seem that into (Anna Baryshnikov, MANCHESTER BY THE SEA) who asks her out after the unplugging, before washing her hands. Lou would rather go home to her cat. But then she meets someone better.
Jackie (Katy O’Brian, Z Nation) is an aspiring competitive bodybuilder hitchhiking through from Oklahoma. Her version of unplugging toilets is getting fucked in the back of a Camaro by some sleaze who promises he’ll recommend her for a job at the gun range. Soon we learn that this guy is Lou’s shitty brother-in-law J.J. (Dave Franco, DAY SHIFT), married to her sister Beth (Jena Malone, FOR LOVE OF THE GAME). J.J.’s mustache makes him look like Burt Reynolds, so they also give him a rat tail, to make sure he’s not too charming.
After that somewhat degrading first impression we see Jackie wake up to a beautiful morning, brush her teeth and do pull ups on the overpass she slept under. An iconic image worthy of Nada from THEY LIVE or Chance from HARD TARGET. Also reminds me of Channing Tatum training on the subway in FIGHTING. Good shit. As you can see in the picture here, Jackie is not just Sarah Connor buff, she’s closer to Rachel McLish in ACES: IRON EAGLE III. O’Brian bulked up with a trainer the way the dudes in Marvel movies do, and has experience in competitive bodybuilding, so she knew what she was doing.
She does get the job waitressing at the gun range, only later learning that her creepy boss is Lou’s dad, Lou Sr. (Ed Harris, GEOSTORM), who our Lou doesn’t speak to. She won’t say why, but we get the idea he’s running guns into Mexico, kills lots of people in the process, gets away with it because he has at least one cop on the payroll. Maybe it’s something to do with that.
We can tell by the cassette players that this is a period piece, not just a place where acid wash is still popular. A reference to DIE HARD puts us around ’89, I think. The electronic score by Clint Mansell (PI, SMOKIN’ ACES, BLOOD THE LAST VAMPIRE) sometimes reminds me of Tangerine Dream, and therefore of NEAR DARK as they drive down lonely desert roads at night. Other movies that popped into my head at times: BLOOD SIMPLE, RED ROCK WEST, LOST HIGHWAY, WILD AT HEART, PERDITA DURANGO. But the one time the filmatism feels like a straight up ‘80s movie is when a song kicks in while Jackie lifts weights at the gym – feels like a training montage and a throwback to the fitness craze that gave us everything from PERFECT to THE TOXIC AVENGER.
Lou can’t take her eyes off of Jackie. They end up sharing a cigarette in the parking lot after close, then spending the night together. Happily it’s a mainstream movie about gay people where bigotry isn’t really a factor, despite the era and the setting. They get to just be romantic and sexy with each other. But they’ll have plenty of dark shit to worry about soon enough, and the seed of their troubles is planted that first night when Lou tries to impress Jackie by giving her some of the steroids the guys at the gym use. Jackie actually hadn’t used them before, but decides to try. Later an ugly situation and confluence of love and roid rage will drag them into a whirlpool of violence and increasingly desperate coverups, centered around that ravine the movie started in. As a drone shot takes us above to look down at the police cars driving along the narrow, vertical opening in the earth I thought hmm, reminds me of something, maybe a part of the anatomy, I’m not quite sure. Difficult to be sure.
Overall it’s not as deranged as some of the movies I mentioned above – compared to WILD AT HEART and PERDITA DURANGO it’s very down to earth and reasonable – but obviously the novelty of the “muscle chick” heroine gives it personality, and Glass also pushes some boundaries in her depictions of lesbian sexuality. (I read that she had the cast watch CRASH and SHOWGIRLS as prep, for what that’s worth.) There are also some memorable spurts of graphic brutality and some sprinklings of outrageous absurdity that make my heart sing. In Glass’s first movie SAINT MAUD (which I watched recently and will review tomorrow) the story comes untethered from reality after a while, but you know it’s the protagonist’s delusional point-of-view of what’s happening. Here Glass eventually says fuck it and lets us all share the same hallucination. I had a nagging feeling that a certain fraction of the laughter at my screening might not have been appreciative, but maybe I was wrong – I continue to hear almost exclusively raves, so many people seem to be tuned to its frequency.
Glass is English, and I took this as her impressionistic portrait of America: muscles, guns, pickup trucks, deserts, trips to Vegas. Sure enough, she told The Hollywood Reporter that she had this female bodybuilder idea and considered setting it in Scotland, but “When you have so many muscles and guns going in there, the film, the characters, the story have a bit more to say of relevance in an American setting. And with the casualness of firearms, I still find that extraordinary going to America. I went to L.A. when SAINT MAUD was doing festivals, and that was the first time I’ve really been to America. If you’re not from there, it does have this weird mythological kind of feel to it. Everything just feels familiar, even though you’ve never seen it before.”
That’s what this is, it’s mythic. And poetic. It’s dark and tragic but seems optimistic. If you ignore all the murder it’s a happy ending. It’s romantic, she gets the girl. (Both girls do.) Jackie doesn’t really do much to redeem herself for her mistakes, but Lou and the movie forgive her anyway.
The most amazing thing about LOVE LIES BLEEDING is that Katy O’Brian exists to star in it. Turns out I’d seen her in The Mandalorian and ANT-MAN AND THE WASP: QUANTUMANIA. I should’ve recognized her, of course that’s her, but the muscles and the long hair threw me off. It’s easy to imagine the less impressive version of this where they hire somebody with the build but not the screen presence, or (more likely) get a known actress to work out and she gets ripped compared to usual but not like this. Like Mark Wahlberg and Anthony Mackie in PAIN & GAIN, in good shape but not seeming like peers to The Rock. We don’t need to suspend our disbelief that way here because they found this amazing person who looks like she really might win the competition she’s entering, and also has big, loving eyes and a wholesome, innocent smile. A cinematic miracle.
And Jackie is a great character. A dreamer, a perfect innocent. She came from somewhere unhappy, transformed herself into what she wanted to be, doesn’t mind being different, doesn’t need much, believes in love, doesn’t like guns. She’s corrupted by the gym’s steroids and by Lou Sr. teaching her how to shoot, and both lead to disaster. But love conquers all, we hope. If not I still loved this movie.
* * *
P.S. I was surprised to learn from IMDb that there are movies called LOVE LIES BLEEDING from 1999, 2006, 2008, and 2012. This is the one from 2024.
March 18th, 2024 at 5:42 pm
I left the theater liking this, but the power of the imagery really grew on me. This was an incredible movie. I read that some asshole was cracking on the poor box office by repeating the idea that Hollywood doesn’t know what people really want to see. But this movie has everything. Gunfights. Workout montages. Puke. Magical realism. Ed Harris as the Cryptkeeper. And that bouncing jawbone! What a cool, underrated effect. It’s one of those movies that’s dirty and grimy and it feels like you have it under your fingernails now, or it’s stuck in your hair.
I’m glad you singled out Katy O’Brien for being this ideal physical specimen for this movie. She’s pretty, feminine, charismatic, imposing, and super muscular, and who else in Hollywood can pull that off? Once you got to that INSANE ending (worth the price of admission, people), you realize this movie isn’t a movie with someone else in that role, you could never convince anyone to bulk up for this and they’d never be able to do it convincingly. I wish we expanded the way we talk about “performance”, as we tend to limit it to emotional expression. It should be taken into account how visually pleasing a performance is. And I’m not talking about sexual attraction but rather how the camera pours over her musculature, and how her altered physique plays a role in the storytelling. The idea that we value this sort of stuff less than someone wearing a prosthetic nose who lost weight on an Atkins Diet is insane to me.