Love Lies Bleeding – Review
AKA: the other movie Kristen Stewart had at the Sundance Film Festival this year… the one I didn’t see there.
**NOTE: this post may be updated with audio once we actually have the chance to talk about it. Until then, you can read Mark’s review below. Remember, though, you can listen to all our discussions of this and every other movie directly over on ACAST. Stay tuned.**
104 Minutes, Rated R (and they mean it)
Written by Rose Glass and Weronika Tofilska
Directed by Rose Glass
Synopsis:
Reclusive gym manager Lou falls hard for Jackie, an ambitious bodybuilder headed through town to Vegas in pursuit of her dream. But their love ignites violence, pulling them deep into the web of Lou’s criminal family.
Set in the heady days of 1989, Love Lies Bleeding is a love story that is decidedly NOT for everyone. Kristen Stewart is Lou, a gym manager, who becomes infatuated (and more) with drifter Jackie, a bodybuilder who is traveling through town on her way to Las Vegas for a competition.
Lou is a woman with a past, one which unspools for us across the film’s runtime, and Jackie has a past of her home, though we learn less of it… and that’s okay.
**SPOILER ALERT: neither of their pasts is particularly positive. **
Drawn together by physical attraction as well as the deep emotion void they both possess, what follows is a love story like you’ve probably never even considered.
And make no mistake: at its heart, Love Lies Bleeding is a love story. These women share everything about themselves the way only love can enable.
And I mean everything…
I’ll be honest, Love Lies Bleeding is not a film for everyone: Sex, drugs, sex, violence, and sex abound. There are some truly and uncomfortably intimate scenes between them… and then there’s the violence.
[FYI: neither of those things bothered me but consider yourself warned.]
Both Stewart and O’Brien put in some really great performances here, with O’Brien, always a fitness buff, taking the role of Jackie to its hyper-extreme.
Think: Zac Efron’s physical transformation in The Iron Claw.
Yeah… that extreme.
Dave Franco plays Lou’s brother… Dave Franco, and Ed Harris exudes all the Big Villain Energy as Lou’s father, a man with a Present, if you get my meaning…
The film is littered with some fantastical scenes, and the end of the film veers right past what might be called Magical Realism and into straight up hallucinatory fantasy… but in a good way(?).
I know it sounds weird, but there it is.
I enjoyed Love Lies Bleeding much more than I might have expected to, mostly due to the overall just-off-balance feel to the majority of the film. I hadn’t connected the fact Rose Glass also directed one of my other favorite whack-a-doodle movies: Saint Maud, which is much more straight-forward than this one.
I guess I’m a Rose Glass fan moving forward, lol.
Check out Love Lies Bleeding if you’re up for a challenge to some of your sensibilities; you may enjoy it.
Love Lies Bleeding hits theaters Friday, March 15 and stars Kristen Stewart, Katy O’Brien, Ed Harris, and Dave Franco.
And remember, if the BEST thing you can say about a movie is that it’s “visually stunning,” then they’ve done something wrong.
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