I don’t know about you, but I feel that Rose Glass’ searing Saint Maud came along at exactly the right time. A devastating glimpse into mental illness, religion and highly dubious forms for footwear, Glass’ debut rocked me back on my metaphorical heels and the second Maud ended with its final, haunting image, I made a promise to myself to make sure whatever Glass made next, I would do my damndest to catch it on the big screen.
Well, thanks to the filmmaker’s delirious second cinematic effort, I got my chance to honor my promise by settling down to watch Love Lies Bleeding, an absurdly gritty crime film that sees Glass throw everything but the kitchen sink at the screen as her sordid, violent tale takes in love, murder, drug use, sex, entomology, bodybuilding and a whole lot of dissociation to provide one of the most delirious experiences of the year.
Louise “Lou” Langston runs her father’s gym in a nowhere town in the year of 1989 and has a whole lot of things preying on her mind. For a start, her bug collecting father, Lou Sr., not only owns the gym and a local gun range, but he has his fingers stuck in multiple criminal enterprises and presumably has ice water running through his merciless veins and Lou is almost certain that her absentee mother was a victim of his ruthless nature. Elsewhere, her homemaking sister Beth is being battered by her shit-kicker husband J.J. and the fact that her wounds are getting progressively worse is yet another source of anxiety for the unsociable woman.
Things change almost instantly when the impressive form of Jacqueline “Jackie” Cleaver walks into the gym one day and starts working out and Lou finds herself drawn to this aspiring bodybuilder who hopes to go to Vegas in a couple of weeks and win a tournament. The two have instant chemistry and before you know it, Jackie is living in Lou’s apartment and sex is flowing like leaky tap, but the first signs that the honeymoon period may soon be over is that Jackie starts abusing the steroids that Lou has gotten her on and she soon starts experiencing waves of paranoia and such intense bursts of rage, it would even make Bruce Banner take a cautionary step back.
After being mega-triggered by an particularly nasty event, Jackie, enveloped in enough red mist to rile up a group of football hooligans, commits an irreversible act that causes a domino effect that puts everyone in the crosshairs of everyone else. Seeing a way to utilise Jackie in order to indirectly bring the law to her father’s doorstep and make him pay for a lifetime of inhuman acts, Lou tries to manipulate matters while keeping her burly boo safe. However, thanks to being pumped full of muscle juice, Jackie isn’t exactly in a good place to listen to common sense; and so matters spiral even worse as Lou’s insular world starts coming apart at the scenes.
There’s a feeling while watching Love Lies Bleeding, the Rose Glass couldn’t actually believe that she got to make another movie and so drilled her sophomore film with as much bizarre, distracting shit as she possibly can to make the film a brutally phantasmagorical freak out that recalls everything from the “you and me against the world” feminist roar of Thelma And Louise, to the more overtly eccentric characters usually found in a David Lynch movie, to even a spot of good, old body horror that did her so well in her first film. In it own way, Saint Maud felt like quite a restrained exercise (self mutilation and religious hallucinations aside) as its title character separated herself from the world due to her powerful delusions, but here, Glass just fucking goes for it, delivering a troupe of fucked up characters who seemingly have barely any restraints between them.
Kirsten Stewart, looking like she hasn’t slept in weeks and equipped with a mullet to die for seems to live her unremarkable life in a state of uneasy discomfort, stubbonly refusing to talk to her monstrous father while simultaneously running ome of his businesses. However, when the sculpted physique of Katy O’Brian’s bisexual Jackie walks in, Lou’s meager existence changes and the effect these two women have on each other is palpable.
However, this is one of those films where love is simultaneously life-affirming and as destructive as a neutron bomb, and Glass positively revels in both effects, veering from unflinching sex scenes so steamy they could cloud up a glass eye, to the detrimental effect that steroid abuse has on Jackie’s mental state. Stewart, fully armed with her endless string of twitches and tics, is great, but it’s O’Brian who catches the eye after smaller – but notable roles – in Andor and Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantumania and hopefully her turn here with open the door to more roles for her. Be it Glass’ lens worshiping her body like a greek god, or the character’s ‘roid rage causing her to batter a man until his jawbone hangs off, she becomes the focal point of the director’s continuing love of body horror as her muscles start to inflate in exaggerated ways complete with crunching and stretching sounds.
While the central romance between Lou and Jackie is the spine of the movie, Glass fills up the rest of the film with various oddities who look like they’ve crawled out of some Silent Hill version of King Of The Hill. Most memorable of these is Ed Harris’ frankly terrifying Lou Sr., an impossibly leathery maniac whose giant glasses are framed by a luxurious mane that horseshoes around his bald dome and who is prone to eating parts of his bug collection during times of extreme stress. Elsewhere, clad in yet another mullet (the film’s rife with ’em) and a shit-kicker moustache, we find Dave Franco as an abusive husband, Jena Mallone as his battered wife and Anna Baryshnikov as Lou’s impossibly clingy admirer with teeth the colour of stilton and they all add to the grotesquely exaggerated nature of the world Glass has created.
There are, admittedly a few issues here and there. Glass’ is having so much fun with all of her random bits and pieces, Love Lies Bleeding can feel deliberately disjointed as events get ever more strange, and an impressively outlandish visual metaphor that occurs near the end of the film might jump the muscly shark for the more literally minded among you. However, Glass has turned in a striking, wild and unapologetically strange movie that delivers the kind of brutal, off beat love story that’ll loosen a couple of teeth.
🌟🌟🌟🌟
We Have Issues 