Gym manager Lou falls for Jackie, a bodybuilder passing through town en route to a competition in Las Vegas.
Kristen Stewart dominates “Love Lies Bleeding” with a performance that captures precisely why the actress, who has long since moved past the franchise that put her name into people’s homes, can be such a galvanizing force onscreen. In what might be her best work, Stewart plays Lou, the proprietor of a gym where muscle-bound men exercise and sweat. In the amusing opening sequence, we see this work up close – until the camera cuts to Lou cleaning up an ungodly amount of secondary business in the customer toilet. It’s a clever juxtaposition and a thematic one for Lou, who spends much of the movie proving why she is needed to clean up messes for other people.
This is also a good scene to showcase Stewart’s magnetic strengths. There has always been a nervous energy in the actor that betrays the character when this is not what is asked (her teases within the studio system, such as that franchise mentioned above or another attempt at one wherein she played a fairytale character, are prime examples of what can happen when it isn’t present). Lou is constantly on edge, always preparing for the next step or a way out, even while the world around her is closing in. Lou is the ultimate in reactive characters, in other words, but nothing in how Stewart plays her suggests that “reactive” could be conflated with “passive.” This complex, richly woven character piece hides inside a crime thriller of messy but admirable ambition.
The core relationship of the movie is that between Lou and Jackie (Katy O’Brian in an audacious breakout performance), a bodybuilder who arrives in the dusty Nevada town where our story takes place, under mysterious circumstances that become more mysterious as the movie closes in on some answers. Co-writer/director Rose Glass gives us hints of what is to come with the character of Jackie via bewildering and off-kilter close-ups of her bulging biceps and triceps, but the movie doesn’t rush those ideas, instead, at first, giving us a simple and simply sweet romance between the two women – appreciably forthright about their mutual physical attraction and the consummation of those feelings (via a few genuine scenes of passion), but also a bit of insight into their personalities in the process.
Each of their personal lives is a shambles. Jackie’s got whatever it is back home (wherever that is) going on, and her first bid at finding a job coincidentally lands her in a gun range owned and operated by Lou’s estranged father, Lou Sr., played by a cold and intimidating Ed Harris, sporting a truly memorable head of hair that should easily go down in the history books. Lou’s sister Beth Ann (Jena Malone) is being savagely beaten on an almost daily basis by her husband JJ (Dave Franco), who happens to be Lou Sr.’s right-hand man in both profession and his pseudo-criminal enterprise. How Lou, the younger, factors into all this is a disappointingly predictable mystery that Glass and co-screenwriter Weronika Tofilska strangely try to keep going long after any suspense has dissipated.
It also doesn’t matter entirely, as Lou and Jackie make a series of desperate moves both on behalf of and at the expense of each other, involving characters that are both aggressor and innocent witness. Everything leads to the nature of Jackie’s character and some hints about why she left home, answered in a baldly straightforward fashion by the final scene of “Love Lies Bleeding.” The answer is more than a little disappointing, but the film has such a laser focus on these characters, and for so long, that the film works anyway.
In Theaters Friday, March 15th
