Review: Love Lies Bleeding – Crimes of passion

Directed by Rose Glass
Starring Kristen Stewart, Katy O’Brian, Dave Franco, Jena Malone, Ed Harris

8.5/10

Love can make us do crazy things, and it can make us crazy in general. We see this in full force in Love Lies Bleeding, and this craziness is only exacerbated by crime, murder, steroids, and a troubled familial past.

Set in the ‘80s, Lou (Kristen Stewart) manages a gym, which is where she meets destitute Jackie (Katy O’Brian), an aspiring bodybuilder who’s planning on heading to Las Vegas for a competition. Luckily for Jackie, she gets to crash at Lou’s place, where they quickly and madly develop a relationship. Jackie also gets a job as a waitress at a gun range, which happens to be run by Lou’s estranged father (Ed Harris).

As the girls’ love grows, so does the violence, and their own crime becomes connected to the crimes of the father. Not pleased about this, he confronts his daughter as to how to clean up their family mess.

Love Lies Bleeding is the kind of confident and fun filmmaking and storytelling with the right amount of style, pizzazz, and (towards the end) artistic audaciousness that comes across perfectly and never becomes boring or derivative.

What’s most important about this story is the love felt at the centre of all this mess. Although Kristen Stewart still doesn’t have the most natural on-screen presence, her co-star is something of a revelation—the rather natty Katy O’Brian works wonders as someone whose derangement is unravelled by her love and her steroid abuse, and she portrays this with intense vigour and aplomb.

This film will be in cinemas at the same time as Drive-Away Dolls, another film about lesbians on the lam. But as opposed to that inferior, tonally unsettling film, Love Lies Bleeding is more assured of itself, has a cooler style, and has a far better and more heartfelt romance at its centre.

If you’re a lonely person, seeing this will make you yearn intensely for the kind of love portrayed so beautifully here. And yet, despite its love-dovey romance, the film still doesn’t exactly have the most positive perspective on humanity. Just about all the characters are scumbags in their own way, particularly the male characters, and by the end of the film, you’ll even find the couple at the centre of this romance troubling. You end up not really loving them, but loving their love.

DAVID MORGAN-BROWN