Review by
Blair MacBride
Directed by: Rose Glass
Starring: Kristen Stewart, Katy O'Brian, Jena Malone, Anna Baryshnikov, Dave Franco, Ed Harris
The curtain rises on another Glasgow Film Festival - but this isn’t like
any before. Celebrating its 20th Anniversary, this year's fest has seen
a whole host of change. With one half of the directorship duo - Allan
Hunter - finishing a wonderful career with Glasgow Film last year, this
2024 festival, and its programme, are sure to shake things up.
To kick off this progressionist festival programme,
Love Lies Bleeding takes the opening gala slot. This
gritty and entrancing thriller grabs you from its first flirtatious
minutes - in fact, it point blank refuses to let you go.
The film - written and directed by Rose Glass - takes place in
what some might deem the "gold standard" decade of cinema. Indeed,
harking back to the nostalgic and much loved aspects of '80s culture,
attire and even hairstyles, Love Lies Bleeding is set in
the American West against the backdrop of Ronald Reagan's war on drugs,
its cold and raw ambience truly gratifying to behold.
The plot follows Lou (Kristen Stewart), a gym manager in a dusty
old town. After new bodybuilder Jackie (Katy O’'Brian) passes
through and begins training for an upcoming competition in Las Vegas,
Lou's intrigue begins to grow, and she tries to entice Jackie's interest
by introducing her to performance enhancing drugs. Soon enough, the pair
become entwined in each other's lives. At first, steroid induced action
and dark humour ensue, and a really boisterous romance begins to brew
between the two, with Stewart and O'Brian fantastic in delivering an
excellent on-screen chemistry.
Other forces in the town begin to show their faces, however. Awful
ongoing family trouble coupled with the maniacal puppeteering of Lou Sr
(Ed Harris) - an insane shooting range owner, local crime lord
and Lou's estranged father - start to not only threaten the once budding
romance, but also the lives of everyone involved.
As alluded to, Stewart and O'Brian excel in their respective roles,
offering some enthralling performances. O'Brian particularly impresses
as the towering all powerful Jackie, delivering an excellent portrayal
of the good, bad and ugly sides of the troubled athlete. Honourable
mentions have to go to Anna Baryshnikov, who plays the freakishly
obsessed-with-Lou Daisy, and Harris as the hilariously frightening gun
nut Lou Sr.
Alongside some on point casting, the script by Glass and
Weronika Tofilska deals with an array of colliding complex themes
with great ease: love; hatred; relationships; violence; a perfect
concoction put together very well. The '80s inspired soundtrack is sheer
class too, perfectly tying in with the rest of the piece, making it an
undeniable talking point and one of this feature's key strengths.
That said, just as Love Lies Bleeding begins to leave a
trail of destruction in its wake on-screen, it soon becomes a casualty
of its own mayhem. The film hits an annoying snag in its middle act,
taking an unfortunate abrupt lull with its pacing, leaving us longing
for its earlier excitement. Not a unique problem, as soon as momentum
feels to be building once again, Glass' feature descends into chaos.
Throughout the film it would be fair to say that there's a constant
general foreboding of something sinister, more abnormal beneath Jackie's
surface. As she begins her juiced up path to bodybuilding immortality,
every hit of her steroids contorts her muscles. We not only see their up
close unnatural growth, but also hear their crunching expansion, and
witness Jackie's journey to un-human-like strength.
These strange sequences, though, do initially appear to play a fitting
role to the unfolding story; that is, until they don't. The once
intriguing peculiarity of Love Lies Bleeding quickly
becomes the laughable absurd. Modern cinema has this fixation of taking
a perfectly gripping story and turning it on its head with outlandish
twists or supernatural silliness. Is it a moment of brilliance? Or is it
an instance of idiocy? That's up to you. In truth, however, whether it's
due to creative preference or merely for laughs, it doesn't quite work
for Glass's latest project, feeling out of context, detrimental to the
80 minutes that have gone before, and just downright daft.
Love Lies Bleeding is a good laugh, and will quite rightly
divide opinion for its audiences. It's entertaining for the most, yet
utterly bonkers to the last, with its enthralling story discredited by
its own crass finale.
