Review: Love Lies Bleeding

Image courtesy of A24.

Being well made isn't necessarily the same thing as being good, and that's a distinction with which I had to wrestle when considering my feelings toward Rose Glass's "Love Lies Bleeding," a well-made movie that I admired a little more than I liked. In the end, I'd say that I could recommend the movie, which has much going for it, even if the experience of watching it wasn't always particularly pleasant.

The film is set in the late 1980s in a remote New Mexico town, where we first meet gym manager Lou (Kristen Stewart) cleaning out the nastiest cinematic toilet since "Trainspotting." It's the first of many messes she'll find herself cleaning during the course of the picture and only the first example of a scene in the film that nearly set my gag reflex in motion.

Lou meets and quickly becomes enamored with Jackie (Katy O'Brian), a newcomer to town from Oklahoma who's passing through on her way to Las Vegas, where she intends to take part in a bodybuilding competition. Jackie is jacked, partly due to her rigorous workout schedule, but also because of the steroids with which she's pumping herself. "Love Lies Bleeding" has the most evocative sound design since the recent "The Zone of Interest," in that every muscle flex or vein popping - not to mention some squishing while dealing with corpses - is reflected nauseatingly on the soundtrack.

Lou has a background that only slowly reveals itself to Jackie, who gets a job at a local gun range, which is run by the creepy Lou Sr. (Ed Harris), Lou's father, who is a local criminal extraordinaire, and whose wife's disappearance is never really explained - but, well, you can probably guess. Lou is troubled that her sister (Jena Malone) is abused by her ne'er-do-well husband JJ (Dave Franco, whose mullet is only the second worst haircut in the picture after Harris' insanely bad one), and Jackie takes note of this.

Soon, Lou and Jackie strike up a relationship, Jackie moves in, and some semi-explicit sex scenes ensue. Meanwhile, JJ takes it one step too far one night and - not to spoil anything here, but... - Jackie takes matters into her own hands, leading to another gag reflex-triggering moment. This leads to a downward spiral involving the police, another young woman who engages in sexual blackmail with Lou after witnessing her and Jackie driving JJ's car in the middle of the night, and Jackie's bodybuilding contest freakout in Las Vegas.

Glass's first film, "Saint Maud," was a religious-themed thriller that sometimes felt like a body horror movie. "Love Lies Bleeding" falls into that same category. Anyone who ever might have thought of using steroids will likely take a pass after watching this picture. Jackie's muscles flex to the point where they seem they might burst at any given moment, and her clear case of roid-rage is outright scary.

The film's eerie nighttime shots and electronic score, blended with its neo-noir trappings and neon-lit atmosphere, reminded me slightly of Nicolas Winding Refn's "Drive," although the film that seems to have inspired much of "Love Lies Bleeding" is David Lynch's freaky "Lost Highway," from the nighttime shots of the highway flying by in the darkness, the creepy scenes in the desert, and even a gruesome death-by-table sequence that feels like a shoutout to the one in Lynch's film.

There's also a similarity to Lynch's film - in which one character literally becomes another halfway through the picture - in that character's pasts and true selves are hidden within the shadows of the night, during which much of Glass's film is set.

So, while "Love Lies Bleeding" isn't a film that's always enjoyable in the traditional sense - it's grim, grimy, and occasionally visually unpleasant - it's a film with much to admire, from the performances (Stewart's Lou is tightly coiled, while O'Brian is outright explosive and Harris is the scariest I've ever seen him) to its stylish visuals and dark sense of humor. One's enjoyment might be determined by how much one can relate to characters whose behavior often veers into the sociopathic and how much one's stomach can take by the grotesque imagery, but "Love Lies Bleeding" is, if nothing else, memorable.