Love Lies Bleeding, a lurid 80s-set thriller premiering at Sundance, is the kind of eager, balls-to-the-wall midnight movie that hopes to keep you awake by cattle-prodding you with shocks, peppering formulaic neo-noir with enough Big Moments to curb any post-beer sleepiness. The raucous response it was met with over the weekend suggests that it might have done the trick for many, but such reliance can be exhausting rather than exhilarating. Without the attention-grabbing, X-rated theatrics, it’s ultimately just a film we’ve seen too many times before, struggling to justify why we’re seeing it again.
Director Rose Glass’s 2020 breakout, low-budget horror Saint Maud quickly developed an impassioned following, heralded as the arrival of a new genre visionary. I appreciated it more as proof of a first-time film-maker’s undeniable visual ability than anything else, gussying up an otherwise ho-hum retread of well-trodden territory.
Glass again proves herself to be a skilled mood-setter, her bigger, brasher follow-up transplanting her aesthetic from Scarborough to New Mexico, but her story-telling remains less punchy, partnering with Weronika Tofilska to tell a theoretically new, yet decidedly old, story.
We’re in familiar small-town crime territory. Tragic lovers sinking into a murk of violence, with the major distinguisher being their gender, two women giving a queer female spin to a subgenre usually dominated by men. But other than some eye-opening sex scenes, their sexuality and gender does very little to differentiate an age-old story, any original detail or observation buried in a mess of cliches.
Kristen Stewart, already having a rocky festival with misfiring sci-fi romance Love Me, plays withdrawn gym manager Lou, who is living a grimy, lonely life that receives a flash of neon when ambitious bodybuilder Jackie, played by Katy O’Brian, comes into town. The two fall fast, their own version of domestic bliss involving egg white omelettes, steroids and a lot of sex, but the curse of Lou’s family starts to creep its way in. Her sister (Jena Malone) is stuck in an abusive marriage with an odious womaniser (Dave Franco) who works for her equally vile criminal father (Ed Harris), and Lou and Jackie’s plan for the future starts to curdle as they get sucked into a squalid vortex of murder.
The descent from bad to worse is as aesthetically alluring as it was in Saint Maud. Glass uses roid rage as an effectively gnarly form of body horror (recalling last year’s yet-to-be-released Sundance drama Magazine Dreams), but it’s all dramatically un-involving, kicked off by a confusingly justified Bad Decision and then hampered by a deadening disinterest in suspense.
The escalation that these stories usually employ, as the net closes in and the tensions fray, is crucially mishandled, and our investment in the central couple – both criminally underwritten – vanishes by the minute with just noise and nastiness to fill the empty void at its centre. There’s very little here from Stewart that we haven’t seen from her before and it’s only in the brief bursts of Anna Baryshnikov, stealing scenes as an excitable gossip, that any real fun can be had.
Glass forces some big, silly swings in the last act, the biggest of which is quite literally too big, but it all feels like desperate distraction, empty provocation upon empty provocation, destined to get people talking but unlikely to have them remembering any of it for longer than the journey home. Without the garish excess, the script is rote and rickety, a ride to the wild side that’s all out of gas.
Love Lies Bleeding is showing at the Sundance film festival and will be released in US cinemas on 8 March, in Australian cinemas on 14 March, and in the UK on 19 April
