Love Lies Bleeding's Genre Breakthrough 

LOVE LIES BLEEDING. One might not have suspected there was room to develop new sub-genres within film noir, much less imagined that hyper-stylized, ultra-violent, Southwestern lesbian romance bodybuilding revenge noir could prove such a fertile and vibrant one. This lack of vision is forgivable, both because almost nobody could have foreseen this development and because we have Rose Glass to show us the way. With only her second feature (after Saint Maud in 2019, which I now must see), Glass and co-writer Weronika Tofilska, under the aegis of current cinema saviors A24, has synthesized a great number of disparate influences into a feverishly innovative version of the classic imperiled lovers archetype.

Somewhere near the Mexican border, circa 1989, Lou (Kristen Stewart) toils ingloriously in a seedy little gym. She is estranged from her bald-pated ghoul of a father, also Lou (Ed Harris), who controls a network of businesses, legitimate and otherwise. Her brother-in-law JJ (Dave Franco), hot on Lou Sr.'s heels in the race to be the biggest shitbag in the world, routinely beats her sister Beth (Jena Malone) within inches of her life and philanders frequently. Irritated by the unceasing affections of lap-dog Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov), unfulfilled in all sectors of her life and haunted by her past misdeeds, Lou is trapped by her (ultimately futile) compulsion to protect Beth. Into this warped little domestic drama hitchhikes Jackie (Katy O'Brian), an itinerant bodybuilder en route to Las Vegas to realize her competitive dream. As soon as she hits town, Jackie becomes entangled with the whole clan, taking a job as a waitress at Lou Sr.'s gun-club/roadhouse and working out at little Lou's gym. She and Lou enter a lethal, impassioned love affair and, in short order, bodies begin to accumulate.

Love Lies Bleeding strikes me as a hopeful signpost along the road to the cinematic future, an indication that there is, despite so much evidence to the contrary, room for movies with ambitions grander than their budget and scale. At its essence, the movie is very much of a type, a sort of noir potboiler brought to lurid life with the vision and assuredness of a director with something new to contribute. I'm not entirely sure why this story needs to be set when it is, but it speaks to both A24's faith in creators and to Glass's imagination and versatility that the setting feels integral to the story. Nothing within the context of the movie belabors the historiography of the piece, nor does that element of its design seem forced in any way. Instead, the seedy sweatiness of gun-worshiping late-'80s border-adjacent America, hideous haircuts, high-cut exercise shorts and all, is as much a part of the movie as its internecine revenge arc.

Which is part and parcel of the deceptive care with which Love Lies Bleeding is designed and executed. There are innumerable examples of movies attempting a similar balance of style and sincerity, grime, grotesquerie and goodness, that have fallen victim to their own unbalanced impulses. More often than not, grossness and artifice overwhelm the integrity of the storytelling and the effect of the thing is completely undone. Glass, with her creative team, has done the nearly impossible here, though, treading delicately past the pitfalls of artistic indulgence. As a result, Love Lies Bleeding can sustain some of its outlandish flourishes (horror-show prostheses and magical-realist interludes among them) with undaunted devotion to a holistic vision of its story and the world in which it takes place.

This could all easily come to nothing without appropriately cast and directed actors, and the success of the whole owes as much to Stewart, O'Brian, et al, as it does to the minds behind the camera. Stewart, as has become her trademark, works actively against her movie-idoldom, playing Lou with innervated, deep-rooted insecurity underpinned by a deadly set of skills. It doesn't hurt that her comic timing is perfect, punctuating the bloodletting with seemingly effortless infusions of humor. And O'Brian, as a semi-delusional aspirant plunging headlong into a bizarre future to escape the past, is revelatory, the perfect corrupted innocent, a more self-aware Lennie to Stewart's long-suffering George.

I could list the reference points I observed within Love Lies Bleeding but it would be a pointless exercise because the movie's great achievement is in transcending influence, or at least in successfully drawing from them to create something refreshingly new. Sexy, funny, gory and scary, with a precisely measured degree of nastiness, it is a finely wrought example of filmmaking as the height of creative recombination and of genre as the gateway to its own transcendence. R. 104M. MINOR.

John J. Bennett (he/him) is a movie nerd who loves a good car chase.

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