- Love Lies Bleeding
- Directed by Rose Glass
- Written by Rose Glass and Weronika Tofilska
- Starring Kristen Stewart, Katy O’Brian and Ed Harris
- Classification 14A; 104 minutes
- Opens in theatres March 15
Critic’s Pick
One of the first images offered in the new thriller Love Lies Bleeding is that of a clogged toilet bowl, its contents crimson and crass. But the gross-out gag isn’t so much a dare for audiences to stick around as it is a straightforward take-it-or-leave it statement of purpose from British filmmaker Rose Glass: this is a movie for those who enjoy getting their hands, among other things, dirty. No soap provided.
Shot with an eye for grime and populated by characters fatally allergic to doing the right thing, Glass’s follow-up to her deeply discomforting 2019 horror film Saint Maud represents as much a levelling up of ambitions as it does an impressively stubborn commitment to pushing buttons audiences might not even be aware that they have. It is an unnerving, skin-crawling experience, but laced with such a genuine romanticism for its muck that it is impossible to shake.
If, as Glass once said, Saint Maud was like watching a girl pick at a scab for two hours, Love Lies Bleeding is an hour and a half of open-heart surgery – disgusting, but ultimately beneficial.
Kristen Stewart, right, and Katy O'Brian in a scene from Love Lies Bleeding.VVS
Set in a half-rotted New Mexico town in the latter half of the eighties, Glass’s film follows two perfectly mismatched souls: Lou (Kristen Stewart), a sullen gym manager whose life is going nowhere slowly, and Jackie (Katy O’Brian), a drifter who harbours dreams of winning a bodybuilding competition in Vegas. After locking eyes in Lou’s gym, the two jump into a passionate but wobbly kind of domesticity – Lou gives Jackie a home, Jackie gives Lou a reason to wake up in the morning.
Their cigarette-stained dream quickly curdles into a nightmare, though, once Lou’s slimy brother-in-law (Dave Franco) and her estranged gun-running father (Ed Harris) saunter into the picture. Soon, bodies are piling up, FBI agents are sniffing around, and the line between cruel reality and twisted fantasy blurs.
Darkly funny, Glass and Weronika Tofilska’s screenplay contains several outrageous twists that push the material into Cronenbergian territory – the leap from bodybuilding to body horror works seamlessly.
But Glass’s world might cling so stubbornly were it not for Stewart and O’Brian, who wriggle into a relationship so all-consuming that it gives new layers to the concept of codependency. Bonus points, too, for Harris, who arrives outfitted with the very worst hairdo in recent cinematic history and then proceeds to chew the scenery (at one point literally) with gusto. It’s all sick, filthy fun.
Barry Hertz