‘Love Lies Bleeding’ Review: Kristen Stewart Finds Love, Drugs, Murder

Kristen Stewart is too famous to be a chameleon, and too distinctive to be a shape-shifter—no matter how hard she tries to disappear into roles, she remains visible and vivid. She knows it, too, and she’s learned how to lean into all the flinty, self-conscious mannerisms that once made her such a polarizing on-screen persona. Stewart has effectively turned her own well-documented anxieties about being the center of attention into her best weapon—and the results have been brilliant. Her specialties are nervous tension and spiritual claustrophobia: She excels at inhabiting outcasts, loners, and runaways. Playing Princess Diana in Spencer, she went past impersonation into empathetic communion; her acting evinced such a sense of discombobulated glamour that she was nominated for an Oscar.

The more control that Stewart exercises over her career, the more she distances herself from a mainstream that never quite knew what to do with her in the first place. Over the past decade or so, she’s been letting her freak flag fly at full mast. It’s hard to imagine another A-lister pulling off the extreme hypnotic solipsism and full-frontal exhibitionism in Olivier Assayas’s millennial ghost story Personal Shopper, or delivering the wryly transgressive mantra of David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future— “surgery is the new sex”—with such compulsively funny topspin. From Assayas to Cronenberg to Kelly Reichardt, Stewart has consciously styled herself—like Nicole Kidman before her—as a ready and willing auteur plaything.

Enter the 34-year-old British director Rose Glass, who, like Cronenberg, is a body-horror specialist: Her excellent 2019 debut, Saint Maud, centered on a lymphoma-stricken choreographer whose agonizing physical deterioration gets juxtaposed against the psychological implosion of her pious—and potentially murderous—hospice nurse. It’s easy to draw a line between Saint Maud’s bruising violence and brooding metaphysics and Glass’s soon-to-be-released follow-up, Love Lies Bleeding, which casts Stewart—pretty much perfectly—as Lou, a lesbian gym manager stewing in her own self-pity and familial dysfunction at the far end of New Mexico. The year is 1989, and here in the desert, Lou—whose responsibilities include unclogging toilets and fending off drunks—is about as isolated from any kind of progressive subculture as she would’ve been on the moon. The cutaways to news reports about the impending collapse of the Berlin Wall seem to mock her sense of entrapment.

There is a long American cinematic tradition of bored small-town girls being rescued from their ennui by dark princes—think Badlands or Natural Born Killers. Love Lies Bleeding, which was written by Glass and Weronika Tofilska, exists in thrall to those landmarks. Between its period setting and aesthetic, it also can’t help but evoke canonical ’90s sleaze like Bound and Showgirls (the latter of which Glass reportedly showed the cast in preparation). Lou has an ardent suitor in the form of Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov), a semi-coherent addict who’s seemingly always underfoot, but the object of her desire is a newcomer: Jackie (Katy O’Brian), a wayward female bodybuilder blowing through town en route to a potentially lucrative competition in Las Vegas. (Actually, Jackie’s very conspicuous arrival puts locals of all genders at DEFCON 3; Daisy is not amused.) Lou’s down bad; the question of precisely where her infatuation with the muscled, mysterious newcomer will lead is the hook, and it proves sturdy enough to hang two movies at once: one a raw, bloody neo-noir à la Jim Thompson, the other a shapely, revisionist sexploitation riff designed for maximum multiplex transgression. It doesn’t take long before Jackie is crashing at Lou’s place and making plans for them to take Sin City together. “I want to stretch you,” Lou whispers as her fingers explore beneath her guest’s elastic waistband—a line that gestures toward how carefully Love Lies Bleeding has been calibrated for the female gaze.

The sheer sensual pleasure Glass takes in photographing and choreographing her two leads in various states of intimacy is palpable, as is the performers’ commitment to their roles. They make quite a pair visually: The disparity between Jackie’s rigorously chiseled body and Lou’s scrawny frame as they stretch out in bed together has the potency of a dirty comic book panel. When Love Lies Bleeding premiered at Sundance, Stewart talked about feeling genuinely turned on by the material, and as a vehicle for a queer mainstream superstar to test-drive her impulses, Glass’s film feels custom-tooled. From scene to (sex) scene, Love Lies Bleeding is decisively more erotic than Ethan Coen’s recent lesbian road movie, Drive-Away Dolls. But it’s also considerably more labored—an exercise in heavy breathing that gradually starts sucking wind, whereas Dolls simply drifts by on its own goofy good vibes.

The wheezing starts with the appearance of Lou’s father, Lou Sr. (Ed Harris), a wizened petty crook who runs the local shooting range and presides over the local underworld with sinister equanimity. Lank-haired and laconic behind blue eyes, Harris looks even more grotesque here than he did in A History of Violence, and while he’s more than up to the task of playing a vivid villain, there’s something mechanical in the character’s menace—he’s less a flesh-and-blood bad guy than an avatar of patriarchal subjugation. The implication is that Lou Sr. has always longed for his daughter-slash-namesake to prove herself as a chip off the old block, and he figures his younger daughter is responsible when his brutish son-in-law, JJ (Dave Franco), disappears into thin air the night after he puts Lou’s older sister in the ER. But the real culprit—as we see in a sequence that kicks the plot into gear and sets the bar high for on-screen gore in 2024—is Jackie, whose repressed anger has a habit of exploding at inopportune moments. A callow bully like JJ is no match for a woman who’s so freakishly strong that she almost seems to be in the wrong cinematic universe. Suffice it to say that you wouldn’t like her when she’s angry.

The quasi-superheroic nature of Jackie’s character is a calculated risk tied to larger artistic ambitions. In Saint Maud, Glass was dealing with a character subject to religious visions, which allowed the director to showcase some surreal, supernatural imagery without violating the film’s narrative coherence. In Love Lies Bleeding, though, it’s the film itself that seems to be hallucinating, as if under the influence of the heavy-duty steroids flowing through Jackie’s body at all times. A lot of what Glass is doing here, with her smash-cut editing and hyperbolic use of sound, could be described as flexing, and some of it is impressive: A sequence in which our heroines drive out to a massive, jagged gorge to dispose of a corpse pays off its own slow-burn suspense tactics with a mythic-looking inferno. But there are also key passages that feel too impressionistic for their own good, like a pageant competition that descends horrifically but unconvincingly into chaos and threatens to push the movie past its own tonal breaking point.

The excitement of such a brazen, reality-blurring approach is real, but so are its pitfalls. By the time these existentially addled characters are drawing battle lines against each other, the excessive contrivance of the plotting, combined with the relentlessness of the style (and the bloodshed), becomes alienating rather than rallying. One by-product of so much steroidal overkill is that Stewart’s own subtly modulated acting gets lost in the commotion, while O’Brian can’t do much more than lurch through the proceedings. The final scenes go hard, and yet there’s something weirdly weightless about the climax, which yields a mixture of exhilaration and emptiness that may or may not be intentional. The best thrillers leave us worn out but satisfied. At the end of Love Lies Bleeding, there’s only exhaustion, and the vague feeling of having been dragged along on a fast ride to nowhere in particular.

Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together is available now from Abrams.