With her first two features, British filmmaker Rose Glass has carved a niche for herself out of making portraits of lonely, isolated women. These characters find themselves in situations that squeeze them until they’re confronted with risky decisions that might also allow them a chance to wrestle back some semblance of control. Glass’ debut, Saint Maud, is a religious horror film about the discontentment surrounding its protagonist’s unrecognized, escalating anxiety and paranoia. Glass’ latest, the late 1980s-set Love Lies Bleeding, similarly centers on a wearied loner—demurring gym front desk attendant Lou (Kristen Stewart). Lou is a bit more self-assured and less repressed than the titular Maud, but she’s still bored, sexually frustrated and dejected from a fraught childhood under the deranged guidance of her local kingpin father (Ed Harris). Lou’s hollowed-out New Mexico town is seemingly only occupied by four other people, three of which are family members, and she’s never left the place, not once.
Love Lies Bleeding is horror-inflected, scored by Clint Mansell with chilling synths and keys. The film is cast in an ominous pall, with many frames—particularly memories—overlaid with blood red filters that make for a bit of unnecessary affectation. But Glass is working on a more expansive scale here, suffusing the movie with neo-noir overtones and fatalistic romance. In doing so, she announces herself as one of the more exciting genre filmmakers of recent years.
The romance crops up when the confident-to-the-point-of-naive Jackie (Katy M. O’Brian) blows into town from Oklahoma on her way to a bodybuilding competition in Las Vegas. Stewart immediately notices Jackie when she pumps some iron at Crater Gym and it’s not long before she offers Jackie a place to crash—“Shut the fuck up. You can stay here,” Lou offers, in her customarily terse, combative manner. The pair daydream about starting a new life together while juggling complications arising from Lou’s past and the violence that haunts her family.
Though Glass wields a palpable but never suffocating, dread-ridden tonal control, she also gets the interpersonal details so right. From its opening, gleeful, somewhat cheeky shots of various patrons heaving and perspiring at the gym, to a subsequent match cut between Lou masturbating on the couch and her brother-in-law JJ (a scraggly, mulleted Dave Franco) having sex in a car, Love Lies Bleeding is steeped in free-flowing eroticism. More than just frankly sexual, the film is actually concerned with the particulars of how we pleasure ourselves and learn to satisfy others. At one point, Lou asks Jackie about her technique when she touches herself, a conversation that feels like something witnessed too infrequently onscreen. Through heated montage and small flashes of intimacy, Glass, Stewart and O’Brian create a relationship that feels credible and teeming with human spark. This is partly due to the filmmakers’ insistence on representing love’s tougher and more brutal elements, the way its charged physicality can teeter toward brutality and the extreme personal consequences, compromises and sacrifices it can induce.
When Lou and Jackie first exchange “I love you’s,” it happens during one of the several courtship montages, which are staged from extremely subjective perspectives, using close-ups, heightened sonic palettes and experiential camera placement. These sequences are so caught up in transformative sensation that they feel unreal, like the projections of desperate and unhappy people. In one scene late in the film, Jackie reaches a near totally dissociative state—the sound is warped, all background noise is cut out and a dizzy disconnect permeates. Glass is fabulous at conjuring these yearning, damaged mental states. This was a feature of Saint Maud too, where Maud also descended into a cloudy, blinkered state over the course of the film. Both Lou and Maud are looking for something to liberate them from their constraining existences, and Glass’ highly personal storytelling method is well-primed for this. Occasionally, it can feel like an excuse to not better or more realistically flesh out the world around these characters, but it makes sense for what is ultimately a well-appointed B-picture: nasty and dirty and content to coast on some shorthand, even if does throb with real, recognizable emotion.
It’s somewhat reductive and dishonest to compare films based on their distributor; studio executives are hardly the best metrics of authorship. However, just months after The Iron Claw’s release, it’s rather unavoidable to not think of fellow A24 title Love Lies Bleeding as its moodier, queerer cousin. Both films—each excellent in their own way—fixate on the body as something we happily push to its limits and pervert. Jackie’s steroid usage is a significant element of the movie, which also relates directly to the untenable fantasies and aspirations that she and Lou are intoxicated by. The gym contains several slogans like, “The body achieves what the mind achieves,” whose inclusions first scan as ironic jokes, yet Glass doesn’t entirely seem to reject these platitudes, serving up a fantastical ending where our heroines are allowed to transcend (some of) the limits of our earthly bodies. Perhaps sometimes simply believing in the possibility of liberation from physical state and circumstance is enough.
Photo courtesy of A24
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