Our first clue that Love Lies Bleeding—British writer-director Rose Glass’ queer, lurid, delightfully disreputable desert noir—is set in 1989 comes when itinerant bodybuilder Jackie shows up for her new job as a server at an outdoor shooting range and restaurant. (America as only a filmmaker from another country could peg it.) “Since Die Hard came out, everyone wants to try the Beretta,” the mulleted creep showing her around says.
In fact, Lethal Weapon had given the same Beretta 92 semiautomatic that hard-luck cop John McClane used to dispatch Hans Gruber’s merry band of thieves cosplaying as terrorists an equally loving product-placement perch, more than a year before Die Hard’s summer ’88 release. I’m not happy that I know this. I do not own or use firearms.
Anyway, as trigger-happy as Love Lies Bleeding and its southwest milieu is—the film was shot in and around Albuquerque, New Mexico—those aren’t the kind of guns this nervy, unpredictable thriller is principally interested in. Though it’s a star vehicle for Kristen Stewart as the disaffected daughter of a stringy-haired, raisin-faced Ed Harris, who plays a career criminal who (also) owns that shooting range, the movie’s breakout performance comes from the magnetic Katy O’Brian as Jackie—a chiseled ladder-climber who will make her way to Vegas to compete in a bodybuilding tournament by any means necessary. She’s shredded, but she also slaps.
O’Brian in real life is a former police officer (!) and bodybuilder, whose acting credits until now have tended toward supporting parts within the Marvel/Star Wars industrial complex. Some of those roles have made use of her background as a lifelong martial artist: She was a regular on The Mandalorian and a CW series called Black Lightning, and she was in last year’s reviled Ant-Man sequel, Quantumania.
Love Lies Bleeding should give her Q score some serious gains: As a conniving runaway who falls hard for Stewart’s gym manager Lou, O’Brian fully embodies a woman operating purely on survival instinct, but who yearns for a richer life. She lacks the emotional experience to handle her fast-blooming, sexually combustible relationship with Lou—that begins after Lou “rescues” the impulsive Jackie from getting into a dustup with a gym bro twice her size—and she has no role models from which to emulate a healthy coupling. Jackie also lacks the physiological experience, and the restraint, to handle the steroids with which the love-starved Lou eagerly supplies her.
Stewart’s Lou is a comparatively cool customer, gazing at the meatheads who haunt the filthy weight room she runs through contemptuous clouds of cigarette smoke. (Smoking in a gym is as sublime an expression of Stewart’s on-screen aesthetic as any.) She never panics when she’s approached by probing FBI agents, which happens with some regularity because her dad is a bad, dangerous dude who seems to have dropped at least a few bodies during his decades in the illegal gun-running game. Lou would happily sever all ties with her old man, but her sister, played by Jenna Malone, is married to JJ, a violent abuser played by permanent creep Dave Franco.
The way these volatile elements react in proximity to one another is the narrative engine for Glass’ gnarly nail-biter. Somehow, in only her second feature, Glass (working with co-screenwriter Weronika Tofilska) has figured out where to honor the conventions of film noir, and where to chuck them entirely, yanking the film in its final act into the realm of the surreal.
I haven’t even mentioned Anna Baryshnikov as Daisy, a lonely barnacle of a girl who can’t accept that whatever brief fling she and Lou had is long past. Truly, there are no nice, ordinary, rational people in Glass’ sweat-soaked, high-contrast universe. Only predators and prey.
The 1989 setting is made more explicit when Lou watches a news report about the Berlin Wall being torn down. In the Love Lies Bleeding press notes, Glass explains that she set it 35 years in the past “because it felt like the ultimate decade of excess, poised right on the cusp of the nihilism of the ’90s.” I enjoyed pondering whether Lou and Jackie had survived until 2024, if they stayed together, and what they’re like at age 70 or so. But Glass could have set her movie in the present day and still reminded us, as she does via that cinematic device that was born in the ’70s but perfected in the Reagan era—the training montage—that Nona Hendryx’s 1983 electro-funk single “Transformation” is an indisputable banger. So is Love Lies Bleeding.
Love Lies Bleeding (R, 104 minutes) opens at area theaters tonight, March 15.