Love Lies Bleeding

1hr 44mins (15)

Gory noir thriller ★★★★

The British director Rose Glass “made a brilliant, disturbing debut with the 2019 psychological chiller Saint Maud”, said Jonathan Romney in the FT. “She takes an unpredictable side turn with her second film Love Lies Bleeding – an all-American slice of crime”, heavily laced with violence and “blazing carnality”. Set in New Mexico at the end of the 1980s, it stars Kristen Stewart as Lou, the lesbian manager of a rundown gym who is stopped in her tracks when Jackie (Katy O’Brian), an amateur bodybuilder, blows in en route to Las Vegas. Smitten by Jackie’s “rippling muscles”, Lou offers her a box of steroids. One “jab in the buttock” later, “red-hot sex ensues”; and soon, Lou and Jackie are an item. Their relationship comes under pressure, however, when Lou’s sister is beaten up by her husband, and Jackie takes brutal vengeance. Essentially a “superior B-movie”, the film loses coherence towards the end, but Stewart is good as a “trembling, tarnished waif”, and Anna Baryshnikov is “nicely excessive” as her “cloyingly insistent admirer”.

This “jaw-dropping” film is a “scoff-it-down dollop of outrageous gourmet pulp” shot through with the same ambiguity that made Saint Maud so exciting, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph. It’s the sort of film you “want to tuck under a mattress: hot, nasty and mouth-wateringly disreputable”. The story unfolds with “wit and dramatic flair”, said Richard Brody in The New Yorker. But as it cuts from plot point to plot point, it forgets to give its two main characters traits, interests, enthusiasms and backstories – giving rise to a blank “sense of emptiness”.