I love it when a promising actor gets a breakout role, and Katy O'Brien has a fantastic one in "Love Lies Bleeding," a crime thriller featuring a lesbian couple. O'Brien plays Jackie, a female bodybuilder who shows up one day at the gym managed by Lou (Kristen Stewart), with big dreams of winning a bodybuilding competition in Las Vegas and moving to the coast. The two start a relationship and move in together, but their troubles soon begin to pile up. Lou's sister Beth (Jena Malone) is married to an abusive lout named JJ (Dave Franco), who is on the verge of going too far. Jackie unwittingly becomes addicted to steroids. An overeager admirer of Lou's named Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov) refuses to go away. Then there's the looming presence of Lou's criminal father Lou Sr. (Ed Harris), who runs the shooting range where Jackie works, and starts pointing her down a dark path.
"Love Lies Bleeding" takes place in 1989, and oozes '80s body worship. The neo noir plotting may follow the Coen brothers' example, but there's an intense physicality to all the depictions of the characters, especially in the sex and bodybuilding scenes, that's much more of the school of Paul Verhoven and Adrian Lyne. Jackie is a rare female film character who is incredibly buff, and depicted as attractive and desirable because of this. And because we're in a dead end town somewhere in New Mexico, nearly everyone else looks a little scummy , perpetually strung-out, and half of the cast sport mullets. Everyone keeps falling in love with the wrong people and resorting to violence. Director Rose Glass is not afraid to show gore, and is not afraid to get surreal, though the imagery is considerably less horrific than what appeared in her last feature, the horror movie "Saint Maud."
I enjoyed "Saint Maud," but "Love Lies Bleeding" is a significant step up. The characters and their moral quandaries are far more complex, and the performances are fantastic all around. I love that we're in the middle of a minor wave of lesbian crime films, but this time around the lesbian characters are so much richer and more interesting than we got in the past. Katy O'Brien as Jackie is so magnetic onscreen, it's easy to see why Lou ignores all the warning signs about Jackie's troubled background to pursue a relationship with her. Likewise, Kristen Stewart's screen persona is a great match for the dissatisfied, impulsive Lou. Her family situation is much more thorny than it seems at first glance, and there's some real ambiguity as to how much of Lou's rift with her father is due to fear of him, and how much is from fear of her own dark impulses.
More than anything, I love the way that Rose Glass juggles different tones here, how Jackie's bodybuilding scenes go from joyous to horror-tinged as her addiction takes hold, and how Lou's intense confrontations scenes with her sister and father will frequently have notes of humor. Dave Franco, as awful as his character is, can't not be funny. And then there's the romance, which is as steamy and erotic as you could possibly want, while still being awfully sweet at times, and occasionally a train wreck you can't look away from. I've seen a few negative reactions to the ending, which features a moment of Lynchian surrealism that was a step too far for some viewers. I thought it was perfect, a glimpse of shared fantasy and madness that creates a fantastic metaphor for the characters' destructive mutual attraction.
It's incredibly satisfying to watch a genre film like this that takes some big chances - on subject matter, on talent, on aesthetics - and to see it all pay off. Before "Love Lies Bleeding," I saw Katy O'Brien pop up in several other pretty high profile projects, including recent MCU and "Star Wars" titles. She never got to do anything nearly as interesting onscreen as she did here. I left the movie absolutely enthused for whatever she wants to do next. And if Rose Glass stays on this trajectory, I'll happily watch everything she ever makes.
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