There are moments when an actor walks on screen and you just sort of know – now there’s a person who I’m going to enjoy watching. By the time Katy O’Brian struts across a gun range in “Love Lies Bleeding,” muscles flexing with a killer smile on her face, you know you’re experiencing one of those moments.
O’Brian plays Jackie, a drifter and aspiring bodybuilder just looking to score enough money to get to a competition in Las Vegas. She rolls into a small, dusty New Mexico town and quickly lands a job at the aforementioned gun range, owned and operated by a man with exceedingly sinister vibes (Ed Harris, sporting an astonishing hairpiece). He asks Jackie if she likes guns, to which she responds no, not really. “Anyone can feel strong hiding behind a piece of metal,” she says. “I prefer to know my own strength.”
And know her own strength she does – within the first 20-ish minutes of Rose Glass’ sweaty erotic thriller, Jackie has had sex with a man for a job, slept and done pull-ups under an overpass, punched a regular at her new gym for being homophobic and taken a returning blow to the face with pride. It’s while she’s nursing that punch that she starts to connect with the gym manager, Lou (Kristen Stewart). The two exchange flirty words and gaze hungrily at each other before Lou offers Jackie some steroids – just a little, to give her an edge for that upcoming competition. The ensuing jab to the butt is like foreplay for these two, but the types of skeletons found in their closets ensure this romance won’t stay peaceful for long.
With “Love Lies Bleeding,” Glass crafts a thriller where love and violence walk hand in hand, a neo noir where the femme fatales hold the center of the frame. Glass – who directed and co-wrote the film along with Weronika Tofilska – delivers a delicious twist of genre filmmaking that’s all grueling physicality, bulging tension and, most of all, great fun. O’Brian and Stewart are more than up to the task Glass presents, running full speed ahead into this story about what it means to take yourself to the edge – and who you’re willing to do that for.
Tension is always on the rise in “Love Lies Bleeding,” and that ever-present feeling of unease is in part due to editor Mark Towns. The way scenes are cut together elicits a high level of discomfort, but whether that discomfort makes you jump, cringe or laugh differs from scene to scene. In one scene, Lou sucks on Jackie’s toes before unceremoniously dropping her foot against the wall, the ensuing bang blended with the jarring gunshot that opens the next scene. In another earlier moment, Lou masturbates on the couch while her cat eats her abandoned dinner bowl. All of a sudden, we hear a voice say something quite vulgar, the mind instinctively connecting the voice to Lou, until we cut to Jackie having sex with with a man in order to get the job at the gun range – a man who turns out to be JJ (Dave Franco), Lou’s skeevy, abusive brother-in-law.
That jarring style of editing constantly reminds us that something dangerous is looming on the horizon. But while we’re waiting for danger to arrive, Lou and Jackie have some fun. Sexual tension is paramount to any erotic thriller, and “Love Lies Bleeding” has it in spades. Cinematographer Ben Fordesman shoots mundane things, like separating eggs and bicep curls, with as much sensuality as the actual sex scenes, O’Brian and Stewart matching that energy beat for beat.
Paradise starts to crumble for this pair after a tense dinner with JJ and Lou’s sister Beth (Jena Malone) where Lou finds out about Jackie’s tryst with JJ and her job at the gun range – a gun range that happens to be owned by Lou’s father, the sinister man Jackie met at the beginning of the film and a criminal with half the town in his pocket. Lou would rather forget that her father exists altogether, but he also represents a path she has been reluctant to let herself take. Lou’s family seems to wreak violence wherever they go, dragging those who get close to them into the mix, hence her reluctance to fill Jackie in on the details.
Despite the secrets surrounding her family, Lou is a fairly straightforward person. If she doesn’t like someone, she wears her distaste for them all over her person. When JJ doesn’t deign to hide the fact that he constantly beats up Lou’s sister, Lou confides in Jackie that she wants to kill him, and the set of her jaw demands that you believe her. But even with Lou’s penchant for violence and sketchy family history, it’s actually Jackie who initially carries an air of mystery – Jackie who makes phone calls that end in the other party calling her a monster, Jackie who had nothing but a sweet smile on her face before she punched the homophobe at the gym straight in the kisser. Jackie who, despite her distaste of guns, fires one straight into the bullseye on the first shot. What does that sunny disposition hide?
Whatever it is brings out a side of Lou that she tries to keep hidden, a side of her that’s scared of how alike her father she is, a side of her that would bleed or kill for someone she loves – something she hasn’t even done for her sister up until this point. The fear of becoming like the man she’s tried so hard to distance herself from materializes in a dreamlike sequence bathed in red light where Lou shoots a man in the head, her father looking on with pride. She has no desire to let this side of her take root, but when Jackie is in trouble she easily slips into that role – the leader who knows how to clean up any mess, who will hurt anyone to make sure the person she loves does not get hurt. Jackie is similar, but fights that urge a little less. It’s in her perspective that Glass brings in her horror background as Jackie begins to (in some cases) quite literally roid out in defense of the woman she loves.
That’s what sits at the center of “Love Lies Bleeding,” what its heightened genre trappings reveal. The kind of love that’s festering between Lou and Jackie is the kind of love that takes you to extremes – the kind that leads you to bleed, lie, even kill.