Stewart flexes acting muscles in a pumped-up slice of lurid pulp fiction
Love Lies Bleeding (15) ★★★★★
Opening the 20th edition of the Glasgow Film Festival, Kristen Stewart thriller Love Lies Bleeding is a wild, audacious, crimesoaked love story that takes its 1980s bodybuilding backdrop as a creative cue to deliver a pumped-up slice of entertainingly lurid pulp fiction. The sophomore feature of Saint Maud’s British writer-director Rose Glass, it casts Stewart as Lou, the mullet-sporting manager of a rundown New Mexico gym whose strained relationship with her gun-running father (a menacing Ed Harris) comes to a violent head with the arrival in town of Jackie (Katy O’brian), an Oklahoma drifter en route to a bodybuilding contest in Las Vegas.
Jackie has the itinerant lifestyle of Bruce Banner and the sculpted physique of his Incredible Hulk alter ego, more so after she locks eyes with Lou while training in her gym. Their instant attraction leads to both a steamy sexual relationship and a new regimen of steroid-enhanced workouts, the latter visually juiced-up with surreal, veinpopping, CGI augmented interludes that track the roid rage brewing inside her.
A brutal killing involving Lou’s scumbag brother-inlaw JJ (Dave Franco) sets both women on a path to potential ruin and Glass – who apparently set an early draft of the story in Scotland before transposing it to the US – has all kinds of fun updating and playing around with sleazy noir archetypes in this more garish period setting.
But if news footage of the Berlin Wall coming down time-stamps that setting to late 1989, the film’s style is pure 1990s overload, with David Lynch’s Wild at Heart, the Wachowskis’ Bound and Oliver Stone’s anything-goes Natural Born Killers just some of its cinematic forbears.
Yet Glass has her own thing going on too and the film's sly references to Popeye and Gulliver’s Travels foreshadow its determination to break free from the naturalistic strictures of respectable arthouse cinema. This is a big flex on screen and off.