Before I get into it, a word to the lesbians: Congratulations, ladies. They finally made a No Country For Old Men for you guys. Nobody deserves it more. If it was up to me, they’d have put this out years ago, but, as a man, it’s not up to me. I know that now. Also, since you’re here: She Hulk fans, congrats on this one, too. They finally made a live action version of her that you might remember more than ten minutes after its done.1
(Also, even though this movie came out a month ago and I saw it two weeks ago, it is now available on streaming.)
With all that out of the way, Love Lies Bleeding isn’t nearly as it should be.2 All the tropes are there and as much as Rose Glass seems to want to play with them, she never quite manages to tell the kind of story that her film needs to be. Sun-burnt sapphic violence can only carry a picture so far. Love Lies Bleeding takes a long time to get started and then falls apart entirely in the third act— and that’s in spite of some of the most memorable imagery I’ve seen this year.
Love Lies Bleeding starts with a standard neo-noir/desert thriller set-up: It’s the late 1980’s (which took me a good thirty minutes to figure out—I just thought they were in New Mexico) and Jackie (Katy O’Brian), a drifter and body builder, wanders into town with nothing more than a dream and an unfulfilled need for anabolic steroids. She runs into Lou (Kristen Stewart), a depressed, solitary lesbian with a dark part. The two become an item, sharing their dreams, their neuroses, blood, sweat, and tears. It goes poorly for them. Jackie, either out of love or a childish inability to control her emotions makes a decision, putting both of them in the sights of the cops, the feds, and Lou’s seemingly estranged and incredibly violent father.
It’s a solid premise and Rose Glass’ chops as a horror director shine through, making the film look good, even if it doesn’t all quite work. As in with horror, a good writer can spin gold out of something we’ve seen before. The Coens and Cormac McCarthy did it with the aforementioned No Country For Old Men (or Blood Simple) and Glass herself, apparently, did it with Saint Maud3. There are things that stand out in the film that none of its contemporaries can claim. Namely, it focuses on queer women. Everything involving Lou and Jackie’s relationship is solid gold. It’s hot. It’s fucked up. It’s messy in a way that feels visceral and real. As rote as genre films can be, this central
If Love Lies Bleeding has anything that is unassailable, it’s its central performances. Stewart is on point, as always, but the real stand out is Katy O’Brian4, who manages to find something sweet in the sensitive and deluded Jackie. Unfortunately, for all its lucidity, Love Lives Bleeding never overcomes its generic trappings. It’s good. Not great. Not terrible, either. And yet, in between its missteps, there is something glittering there. A slightly better film just beyond the dust.
The cast is rounded out by Ed Harris, who, in a rare turn, seems to do most of his acting with his hair, and Dave Franco, who, in a slightly more common turn, is also doing most of his acting with his hair. While the later two men could probably do this film in their sleep, the real stand-out in this film is Anna Baryshnikov5. playing Daisy, Lou’s wanna-be love interest who just won’t take the hint. Her character is so real it hurts. While everyone else in this film is very clearly in a film, Daisy feels so real, so genuine, so deeply pathetic, that I almost have to wonder for her safety and not for any characters.
The issue with this characters (besides Daisy) is that they all seem to be burdened with affectations, rather than being well-rounded. While the female characters are generally immune to this (or at least their quirks lead us to something), the men, lacking any sort of complexity are reduced to affectations. As I said, Ed Harris has hair. Dave Franco also has hair. Ed Harris has bugs. Dave Franco beats his wife. There’s a cop who I’m sure has a name that disappears once his end of the story is complete. And so on. Which is fine. Men don’t need to be special (and even if they did, they can take the backseat for one film). The problem is that the story relies on these jerks as antagonists and without anything interesting going on, the film halts. It’s a microcosm of what is wrong with the film: Interesting choices that don’t add anything to the greater piece. There’s a fine line between a character that sucks as a person and a character that sucks as a character and, unfortunately Rose Glass fails to find it.
The failures of the film are compounded by the third act, where the general braindeadedness of the plot gets compounded instead of resolved. It is also in the final minutes of the film that you probably either fall in love with it or you fall off of it completely (I was the latter, to be clear). The dashes of magical realism— the thing that makes this film stand out as a work of genre— don’t complicate the story so much as it makes it incoherent.6
The shame of Love Lies Bleeding isn’t that it’s bad, it’s that it should be better. It has all of the ingredients to make it not only an all-timer for me, but one that might stand out as something more than a curiosity—a failed second film7. While there are moments of brilliance in the film—the acting, the score, and the some of the swings at surrealism—none of it is powerful enough to overcome the film’s general incoherence. It just isn’t funny, thrilling, or sexy enough to get away with its incoherence. I know I’ll see worse movies this year, but I don’t know that I’ll see a more disappointing one. Then again, like Lou herself, maybe this one just isn’t for me.
If you liked this review at all, make sure you check out my podcast, A Quality Interruption, as well as its Patreon. I love writing about film, so it’s always nice when somebody actually wants to listen. I don’t know, man, this shit is hard.
Seriously, though, does anybody remember She Hulk? Even to be mad at it? What’s Marvel doing that these shows disappear upon release?
For more see: The Hitcher, Near Dark, Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Salton Sea, and Blood Simple— and hell, since we’re at it: Raising Arizona. For Minnesota boys, they sure are good at this whole desert neo-noir business. You know what, just check out my list here. I’m working on it.
I say "apparently” only because I haven’t seen it. It’s on the list, believe me.
She was in The Mandalorian? Inspired casting. They lost one actor with a great set of shoulders and replaced her with another, better actress with a great set of shoulders. That show is terrible, but somebody over there deserves a medal.
And, yes, she is one of those Baryshnikovs.
I won’t nitpick the hallucinations/magical realism moments of the film, because that’s boring, so instead of complaining about how sloppy I think those scenes are, I’ll complain about the sloppiness of the body disposal. It’s a film in which not one, but two people are conveniently killed directly over a rug, so they can be rolled up and tossed into the back of a car. This is such a pervasive problem in the world of Love Lies Bleeding that a character has a SECOND RUG just ready to go, just for such an occasion.
I went to see this movie at a Landmark theater and before it began there was an entire front-facing video from a film critic (?) praising the film and how it doesn’t fail as a second film (putting it alongside Alien and Pulp Fiction which. . . come on). I have never seen something like this before: An argument for the film before the film starts. I don’t know if this is something for this film or just for Landmark theaters or whatever, but it’s odd and a little off-putting. I already bought the ticket, I don’t need to be pitched it. More than that, I don’t need to be told how great it is. You already got my money, let me figure it out