Love Lies Bleeding Movie Review: Rose Glass's second directorial effort reworks the codes and languages of modern Westerns, neo-noir, and sentimental cinema, giving life to an incredibly disturbing and seductive pulp hallucination. In theaters from September 12, 2024.
Among the very first visual suggestions of Love Lies Bleeding, a courageous and disturbing second work by the young British author Rose Glass, rightly kept under observation by the New York company A24, which five years ago produced and distributed her convincing and minimalist directorial debut Saint Maud, there is a glimpse into the night, in the American desert and thus into the mind of the solitary and observant Lou, the absolute protagonist of the film, played by a Kristen Stewart who has never been so sensual and fragile. As mentioned, a red-tinted gash, which slowly changes into deep darkness, immediately suggests to us the ambiguity of the identity of the faces and bodies that we are about to get to know.
Starting with Jackie (Katy O'Brian, who was a fighter even in real life, gives life to a bundle of muscles and sexual instincts of rare ferocity and dramatic intensity), a young foreigner who comes from far away, who finds herself, against her will, a pawn in a provincial America without a name, in which crime and family violence intertwine, ending up getting confused. Again, J.J (Dave Franco between clandestine sex and domestic violence, seems to wink at Sebastian Stan's Jeff Gillooly in I, Tonya), the cruelly brainwashed wife Beth (Jena Malone, protagonist of a true Hollywood rebirth, here horribly deformed) and the father, the one who has no name, but a role, or perhaps much more than one, both concerning blood, and to destiny, which is never chaos, nor even chance, rather diabolical will. Who better than Ed Harris could have embodied such ambiguity and emotional restlessness?
Sex, gym, and authorial influences
Even before the violence, blood, and a macabre family showdown at the center of Love Lies Bleeding, Rose Glass guides us through the run-down yet more than frequented gym run by Lou. Where there is shit that repeatedly clogs the toilets and sweat that soils benches and dumbbells, there can even be love. In fact, Lou and Jackie observe each other through the mirror - here the trace of identity ambiguity and doubling returns - without however speaking to each other. They will do so at a later time, and sex will follow, which is not suggested, but rather shown in its awkward, seductive, and explicit charge since it is definitively alien to the shame and modesty, typical of much recent cinema, homosexual and otherwise. They will live together, that's why the family, that's why the violence that suddenly breaks the calm and thus the fragile balances built by the two and even more by Lou, who has remained alone for too long and is running away from a life that hides in her gaze, destined to reappear more and more.
From an act of “ordinary” domestic violence, a recurring theme in the cinema that tells of provincial America, to another of extraordinary madness, almost hallucinatory, certainly psychedelic, and sweetly ruthless, as only a decisive encounter postponed for too long can be. Here, in fact, there are two decisive encounters. That of Lou with the macabre ghosts of her father’s memory and legacy, which silently and bloodily creep and survive in her very being a woman incapable of loving and truly living, and that of Jackie with nature from which she has always escaped. Everything happens under a wonderful starry sky and a provincialism that is sometimes funny and sometimes desperate, to which Rose Glass skillfully gives life between cinematic and literary citations that pass through names such as Dashiell Hammett, James Ellroy, Cormac McCarthy, Elmore Leonard, Paul Verhoeven, and Sean Baker.
Love Lies Bleeding: evaluation and conclusion
Who would have ever said that the modern western, after the excellent television and cinematic creatures of Taylor Sheridan - to whom we owe the narrative universe of Yellowstone - and Scott Cooper, would soon pass through the languages of a queer cinema on steroids and unpredictably fun and pulp like those offered by Love Lies Bleeding? Rose Glass in her second work winks at Tarantino, but in the gash that opens and dyes with red and then with amniotic and deadly darkness, there is ample space for many other voices and tracks. From the cult of the idiot typical of the cinema of the Coen brothers to the murky, sweaty, and gloriously exhibited sexuality of Russ Meyer and Jess Franco and also the evil of the unconscious, of the bodies, and of the night of David Lynch in Blue Velvet, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Drive.
Beyond the quotations, however, there is the gaze and the directorial cut immediately recognizable from here on out of Rose Glass, to whom we owe one of the cinematic cases of the year, one of those that not only are not forgotten after a long time, but that appears destined to mark the history of cinema due to their unpredictable soul and stylistic/narrative strength, as well as thematic. Love Lies Bleeding is in fact not only a crazy love story, nor a tale of revenge or a typical noir or neo-noir investigation. It is a mix of these languages and something still different and curiously new. It is the cinema of Rose Glass.
Suppose the two incredibly tormented, electrifying, and seductive performances by Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian were not enough. In that case, Clint Mansell’s soundtrack is worth the vision and with it the most significant moment of emotional and sexual encounter in recent international cinema. Jackie does it herself, at her feet Lou observes, and then slowly begins her exploration, which is of body, soul, and much more, observing the pleasure and making it her own, in the name of a promise of love and family, which held there and now survives for eternity, despite the evil, the violence and what both have been in the past and that for no reason, they want to be anymore.