Sublime — “Love Lies Bleeding”

“Love Lies Bleeding” throws the 80s off a cliff. Generational violence, complacency, exploitation, just all of it, off the cliff it goes. What an absolutely wonderful, jaw-dropping, ridiculous, tense, and hilariously beautiful piece of cinema. Occasionally a piece of art comes along that just makes me giddy that such a thing exists in this world.

Kristen Stewart plays gym manager Lou. She falls for Jackie, a woman passing through town on her way to Las Vegas for a bodybuilding competition. Lou introduces Jackie to steroids, a bad idea when Lou’s cornered by her gun-running father Lou Sr. (Ed Harris), and her sister Beth (Jena Malone) is abused regularly by her husband. After an initial honeymoon period of dating, things spill wildly out of control for Lou and Jackie. Murders, clean-ups, chases, and shootouts abound.

I’ve heard this described as a queer erotic thriller and that’s not off the mark. Content-wise, it’s on the nose. In terms of style, this is an 80s vengeance thriller that plays very close to the exploitation movies from which the genre branched out. It’s a type of exploitation movie that deconstructs exploitation movies. The deconstruction’s always on the move, though. “Love Lies Bleeding” never consciously shows off what it can do because it so thoroughly and effectively inhabits the genre it’s busy wrecking its way through.

“Love Lies Bleeding” re-imagines the exploitation movie as a film of queer empowerment that aggressively, unapologetically fights against generational trauma and the burden of secrets. It’s filled with sex and gore, and its vision of the 80s is all cigarette ash and sweat broken by storms of howling color.

Kristen Stewart continues as one of the best physical actors out there, someone who acts out emotion through her entire body. I get that criticisms of her facial acting exist, but they’re largely overstated. She does so much with tension and eyelines that, yeah, sometimes one nuance gets mistimed, but when it’s surrounded by 20 other tics and shivers and panic in the eyes and collapse that runs through the tips of the fingers, I could not care less that she ‘only’ lands 19 out of 20 nuances most actors wouldn’t even think to attempt.

Few actors embody self-questioning, the sense of being overwhelmed racking numbness through your limbs, the moment of clumsy determination when your mind is recovered and telling you what to do but the body still isn’t up to following precisely, the desperation of being trapped by others’ expectations, the anger not at others but turned inward for letting yourself get cornered like this.

Somehow standing out even more is Katy O’Brian, whose Jackie enfolds an anger and drive that doesn’t so much tell her backstory, but rather fills everything-but. And when everything else is filled in, we might not be able to see that backstory, but we can see the empty shape around which everything else in her treads lightly. O’Brian’s is a towering performance of anger that wants a target, of desire for agency in her own story regardless of whether she has to topple the entire film she’s in to get it. She is fucking phenomenal.

Ed Harris’s Lou Sr. is easily contemptible, a controlling patriarchal figure who guilts Lou because she’s so much like him – not through any fault of her own, but because he shaped her that way. Jena Malone, Dave Franco, and Anna Baryshnikov all deliver memorable, sometimes disgusting, sometimes heartbreaking performances.

The surging momentum of “Love Lies Bleeding” is underlined by a bubbling Clint Mansell score of yearning, dreamy Tangerine Dream synths over stalking John Carpenter backbeats. There’s a lot of 80s music that establishes the when and sells the film’s darkly comedic moments, but it’s Mansell’s score that underpins the precarious emotional and existential stakes.

The film that “Love Lies Bleeding” reminds me of most is Prano Bailey-Bond’s “Censor”, a 2021 Welsh giallo horror that describes Margaret Thatcher’s politics as a metaphysical terror, and England’s historically recent abuse of Welsh industry as a still violent and exploitative act.

I raise this not because more than a few people are going to have seen “Censor”, but because “Love Lies Bleeding” director Rose Glass is part of an incredible push of women making films that both inhabit their genres expertly while also seeking to break and remove the poison from those genres.

I count Glass’s approach to the 80s vengeance thriller and Bailey-Bond’s take on the exploitation giallo among these. So too Julia Ducournau’s body horrors “Raw” and “Titane”, Anvita Dutt’s gothic horrors “Bulbbul” and “Qala”, Nikyatu Jusu’s house horror “Nanny”, Nida Manzoor’s martial arts comedy “Polite Society”, Lauren Hadaway’s take on the sports film in “The Novice”, and Emerald Fennel packing judgment into the faux-objective cinema-of-excess with “Saltburn”.

It is harder for men to reliably do this because, well, men are the ones who poisoned the well on so many of those genres. Each of these films does this differently because each genre requires different approaches and conclusions. But each film works exceptionally well within its genre; it has to in order to evolve it.

So yes, there is a genre evolution or re-imagining in “Love Lies Bleeding” that can occupy your thoughts for long after. Sure, occasionally something like that can obstruct the cinematic experience of just watching and enjoying, but in all these films and especially in “Love Lies Bleeding”, it instead elevates that experience. It wraps up and takes off running with those primary, immersive, utterly tense, and deeply moving reasons you sat down to watch in the first place.

I love a film that can pull off both. Make no mistake: this incorporates as much sex and gore as an exploitation-offshoot 80s vengeance thriller could ever want. But it’s also so deeply tender, in a way that its tenderness is close to viciousness, complete with one of the most outlandishly wonderful metaphors I’ve seen in a film, one that would be laughably ridiculous if it wasn’t such a stunning moment of care and beauty.

The quality of acting, the visuals, the atmosphere, the ratcheting tension, music to make a foggy night collapse in on itself, an eye that no matter how clouded can still see love through it all, the dark humor that completely upends that sentiment without ever sabotaging it…“Love Lies Bleeding” is so packed with rolling, thundering, bursting cinematic energy that it feels less like a story humans are capable of constructing and more like an elemental force of nature somehow conjured.

“Love Lies Bleeding” is in theaters. Please be aware of COVID risk in your area.

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