Love Lies Bleeding
Once again Kristen Stewart breaks new ground in a muscular, edgy, intimate, brutal and tense neo-noir thriller.
Love among the tendons: Katy O’Brian and Kristen Stewart
Courtesy of A24
One thing is certain, Love Lies Bleeding confirms the emergence of a singular new talent in indie American cinema. Her name is Rose Glass and she was born in London, England. Her first feature, the hallucinogenic, full-blown Gothic Saint Maud (2019), was named best British film by the London Film Critics’ Circle. Yet even if one begged to differ, one could not ignore the selfless commitment of Glass’s leading actress, Morfydd Clark. Here, Glass has corralled Kristen Stewart to do her bidding, along with the martial artist and bodybuilder Katy O’Brian – and the results are, well, mind-blowing. Stewart – or KStew, if you must – has had one of the least conventional careers in recent Hollywood history, skipping from child star to franchise princess, tabloid toy thing to arthouse darling, from action star to Oscar nominee. One doesn’t know where she will turn up next. Here, under the tutelage of Rose Glass, the actress gives courage a new name, performing acts for the camera one does not usually expect from a Hollywood luminary.
Rose Glass sets her scene in New Mexico in 1989 on the fringes of the bodybuilding and gunrunning worlds. Stewart plays Lou Langston, a disgruntled gym assistant who we first see freeing the contents of a blocked toilet pan (look away now) and showing little consideration for her customers. She lives alone with a cat, smokes incessantly (while listening to nicotine admonishment tapes) and masturbates on the sofa. Then she espies Jackie Cleaver (Katy O’Brian) flexing her stuff in the gym mirror. For Lou, the beautiful stranger is a blast of glamour and possibility. For Jackie, the androgynous gym manager could swing her a bed for the night. Two souls lost in a dead-end town, Lou and Jackie could just about take on the world – first amongst the dumbbells, then the bed linen. But darker forces are circling…
The film is not without a deep vein of black comedy, much of it supplied by Jena Malone as Lou’s sister, who is constantly popping painkillers as her face takes on a kaleidoscope of cuts and bruises thanks to the temper of her husband (Dave Franco) – yet the show must go on. And then there’s their father (Ed Harris), both bald and lank-haired, both a weirdo and a psycho, who plays with a dung beetle while snarling at those who disapprove of his gun-faring ways.
Before the film’s abrupt change of tone in the final phases, Love Lies Bleeding recalls a lost milieu of cinema once popularised by the likes of Monte Hellman and younger incarnations of Scorsese and Bogdanovich – the ossification of a Wild West tarnished with neon and pick-up trucks. But for all its neo-noir and trash-punk allusions, it is rooted in a painful reality thanks to the anchor of Kristen Stewart’s humanity. Consequently, what follows is shocking as well as gritty, raw, tender, gaudy and intense, all at once. Why much of it works so well is because of the attention to detail, from the distinctive sound design to the endless skies, right up to the close-ups of O’Brian’s vein-mapped biceps. Neither narrative nor tone is forecast in advance, keeping one on one’s toes, breathless, horrified and sometimes a little perplexed.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Kristen Stewart, Katy O’Brian, Jena Malone, Anna Baryshnikov, Dave Franco, Ed Harris, Orion Carrington, David DeLao.
Dir Rose Glass, Pro Andrea Cornwell and Oliver Kassman, Screenplay Rose Glass and Weronika Tofilska, Ph Ben Fordesman, Pro Des Katie Hickman, Ed Mark Towns, Music Clint Mansell, Costumes Olga Mill, Sound Paul Davies, Dialect coach William Conacher.
A24/Film4/Escape Plan/Lobo Films-A24/Lionsgate UK.
103 mins. UK/USA. 2023. US Rel: 8 March 2024. UK Rel: 3 May 2024. Cert. 15.
