If there were an award for the battiest movie in town, “Love Lies Bleeding,” a film about a mad, doomed lesbian love affair between a gym worker and a body builder, would win it hands down. Featuring a startling performance from actor and martial artist Katy O’Brian (TV’s “The Mandalorian”), who went all in on the body building as Jackie, and Kristen Stewart as Lou, the toilet-cleaning, lonely gym worker, “Love Lies Bleeding” begins with jungle drums and informational signs at the gym with lines like, “Train At Your Own Risk” and “Only Losers Quit.”
Trouble starts immediately when drifter Jackie lets Lou’s loathsome, wife-abusing brother-in-law JJ (Dave Franco) have his way with her in exchange for a job at a 1980s-era Texas shooting range owned by Lou’s estranged, criminal father, amusingly named Lou Sr. (a grotesquely-coiffed Ed Harris). In addition to owning the popular gym where Lou works, Lou Sr., runs the town’s drug trade and a gun-smuggling operation. Living alone in some weird, castle-like compound, Lou Sr. is a nutty, Dracula-like dude, who owns the local police force and whose wife has “not been seen” in ages.
Directed and co-written by English filmmaker Rose Glass of the whacked-out, award-winning 2019 entry “Saint Maud,” “Love Lies Bleeding” kicks off as a lesbian film noir about two young women whose thunderous affair is matched by the violence it seems to ignite all around them. While smoking, Lou listens to tapes that are supposed to help her quit smokin, the favorite past time of the film noir genre, outside of drinking. JJ and Lou Sr. appear to be having world’s ugliest mullet contest. When he isn’t stripping paint just by staring at it, Lou Sr. likes handling big, nasty-looking bugs and larvae.
With its liminal spookiness, sudden savagery and occasional miracles, “Love Lies Bleeding” shouts, “I am the new David Lynch,” from the rooftops, and Glass may be, although we still have the old one.
But like “Saint Maud,” “Love Lies Bleeding” sacrifices wholeness of vision for shock value. “Saint Maud” tells the story of a hospice worker (Welsh actor Morfydd Clark of TV’s “The Rings of Power”), who becomes a religious fanatic and appears in one scene to levitate in divine ecstasy. In “Love Lies Bleeding,” the F.B.I. sniffs around, looking for Lou’s mother. Jackie, who does pull-ups and push-ups outdoors and had been sleeping outside, stops in Texas from Oklahoma on her way to a body-building contest in Las Vegas. While Stewart is the film’s established star, it is O’Brian who dazzles.
For one thing, she looks genuinely off her rocker from the start. Lou is head over heels for this outrageous-looking newcomer and invites her to stay with her in her small flat. When Beth (Jena Malone), JJ’s wife and Lou’s sister, ends up in the hospital after a severe beating from JJ, Lou is distraught. In a rage, Jackie kills JJ, horribly mangling him
Oh, what a tangled web we weave when we crush skulls. Could Jackie be going insane because of the steroids Lou is injecting into her? Why do I have the feeling I’m an inmate at Arkham Asylum watching this film? Jackie heads for Vegas, where she has a mishap on the stage. Will the film run out of rugs in which to wrap bodies? The chemistry between Stewart and O’Brian sizzles. Anna Baryshnikov (TV’s “Dickinson”) is also memorable as Lou’s meth-addled, love-hungry friend Daisy. Score by Clint Mansell (“Black Swan”) is as certifiable as the film, which has a truly distressing twist.
(“Love Lies Bleeding” contains drug use, violence, profanity, nudity, sex and gore)
“Love Lies Bleeding”
Rated R. At the AMC Boston Common, AMC Causeway, Alamo Drafthouse Seaport, Landmark Kendall Square, Coolidge Corner and suburban theaters.
Grade: B+
