Listen. They’re giving you advance notice with that title.
As much as I’m in favor of you supporting your local movie theater by making a trip to the concessions counter, I must caution you that on at least (let me do a count) one-two-three-four-five occasions over the course of “Love Lies Bleeding,” there’s a strong chance the grotesque and/or shocking images will cause instant loss of appetite.
Not that the enormously talented director Rose Glass (who wrote the screenplay with Weronika Tofilska) is engaging in shock value for the sake of shock value. This is a meticulously crafted and thrillingly rendered piece of 1980s pulp that plays like an homage to “Fargo” as filtered through the body horror works of David Cronenberg, with a sprinkling (or should we say spattering) of influence by the likes of Tarantino and David Lynch as well.
It’s the kind of film that grabs you from the opening sequences and holds you in its grimy grip all the way through the closing credits, when the s- - - is still hitting the fan.
Also, this movie features Ed Harris as a man of pure evil who sports a hairstyle that makes him look like Vigo the Carpathian from “Ghostbusters II,” and how great is that.
A strikingly lurid erotic thriller, “Love Lies Bleeding” is set in the seediest and darkest corners of a small New Mexico town in 1989, in places that seem a bit sketchy in the middle of the day, let alone in the deep of night. An Oklahoma-born drifter and aspiring competitive bodybuilder named Jackie (Katy O’Brian) has been in town for all of about 24 hours when she sets herself up with a job at a local shooting range by having sex with the manager, the slimy J.J. (Dave Franco), in his car, and finds a place to crash after hooking up with Kristen Stewart’s Lou, who runs the local gym.
What Katy doesn’t realize is that J.J. is Lou’s brother-in-law, and that Lou loathes J.J. because he’s a monstrous creep who regularly beats Lou’s sister, Beth (Jena Malone), and that Lou’s father, Lou Sr. (that’s right), is a gunrunner who owns both the shooting range and the gym and has a weird thing for large insects.
That’s a lot to process and there are plenty more twists and turns coming, some of them so surreal it’s as if we’re in a science fiction movie, some so grounded in brutal reality that it’s hard not to turn away.
At first, it appears as if the connection between Lou and Jackie is purely sexual. Jackie is an incredible physical specimen (O’Brian is a real-life bodybuilder and martial arts ace) and Lou is mesmerized by her, but the relationship turns into something more, maybe even love. It’s clear Jackie and Lou have never been more alive than when they’re together, but it also seems as if they’ve never been more dangerous.
(The sex scenes between Stewart and O’Brian are explicit and edgy, but never seem gratuitous; we believe these two wounded and troubled but passionate people would go there. And there. And there.)
This is the kind of film where no bad deed goes unpunished. One crime leads to another, and to another, and to another, and there are times when it appears as if there isn’t a single person in this warped and broken town who isn’t utterly irredeemable. (Well. We do see a couple of kids and they seem fine. For now.)
Jackie’s original intent was simply to pass through Albuquerque and spend a little time there before making her way to Las Vegas and a bodybuilding competition, and she indeed arrives just in time for the event, but to say it doesn’t quite pan out like she dreamed is your basic understatement of the year. Soon she’s back in New Mexico, sinking ever deeper into the muck.
Cinematographer Ben Fordesman (with the help of some jarringly good makeup and practical and special effects) consistently provides striking images; when the story takes us into the desert at night, as stories like this often do, it’s like we’re on Mars, utterly separated from civilization.
Kristen Stewart continues to be one of the most interesting, risk-taking and versatile actors around (she’s still only 33 and has built an impressive body of work), while Katy O’Brian proves to be a worthy onscreen partner in taking on a role that at times makes Jackie seem almost like the Hulk, especially when the steroids kick in. “Love Lies Bleeding” has a number of wonderfully twisted moments, e.g., when a particular character cries out, “You don’t know anything about love!”
Oh my. By that time, we’ve come to realize nobody in this sordid tale has ever come close to knowing anything about love.
