Love Lies Bleeding: A Scorching Hot Romance
Rose Glass’s follow-up to her acclaimed Saint Maud is a darkly violent tale of a gym manager’s love affair with a bodybuilder. Kristen Stewart shines as Lou, the manager of a bodybuilding gym in a seedy New Mexico backwater. Her natural magnetism is somewhat muted behind a whey powder pallor, an air of defeated weariness, and hair that looks as if it’s been deep-fried rather than washed.
“The key to Kristen Stewart’s mesmerising screen presence is her ordinariness.”
Stewart’s performance is seeded with little glitchy details and gestures - the way she rakes her fingers through her fringe; the moment when she nervously wipes her nose on the sleeve of her T-shirt. These seemingly unconscious tics humanise her characters, making them relatable and grounded.
When the rest of the movie launches itself headlong into outlandish, almost cartoonish excess, Lou is plausibly three-dimensional and grounded. The rooted realism that underpins Stewart’s performance offers a necessary balance to some of the more untrammelled impulses in Glass’s follow-up to her impressive debut feature, Saint Maud.
Bodybuilding: a world of sweat and steroids
There’s a whole lot of blood in this movie, which embraces full-bore nastiness on every level. Another significant asset is newcomer Katy O’Brian, who shoulders what is probably the most demanding role in the film. Jackie is a bodybuilder from the kind of God-fearing midwestern farming country that views a “muscle chick” as an unnatural abomination.
Katy O’Brian shines as Jackie, a bodybuilder with confidence and physical assurance
Blowing into Lou’s grim home town, more a collection of strip malls and casual violence than a functioning community, Jackie decides to hole up for a while and earn some money while she prepares for a bodybuilding competition in Las Vegas. She is a magnificent creature, glistening with confidence and physical assurance.
The relationship that ignites between Lou and Jackie is sweaty, grubby, and scorching hot, but as the steroids do their work, warping and distorting Jackie’s body and her mind, a savage, self-destructive, simmering violence creeps into their romance.
The romance between Lou and Jackie is sweaty, grubby, and scorching hot
And this is where Lou’s sister Beth (Jena Malone) and her husband, JJ (Dave Franco), come in. At first glance, the pair seem to be woefully underwritten, schematic cardboard cutouts rather than layered characters. She’s the battered wife; he’s the short-fused bully who takes out his inadequacy on his spouse.
Concern for Beth’s safety is why Lou can’t bring herself to leave this spiteful small town, despite numerous reasons to do so (first of these being her gun-toting estranged father, played with reptilian menace by Ed Harris).
But I suspect that Glass intends Beth and JJ to be more than just the dramatic device that unleashes the film’s dark heart and violent impulses. They also serve as a kind of twisted mirror image of Lou and Jackie’s amour fou and a cautionary warning that any relationship this thoroughly soaked in blood can’t, ultimately, end well, however invincible the partnership and the passion that drives it might seem at the time.
Love Lies Bleeding: a scorching hot romance that descends into darkness
