Love Lies Bleeding is a bizarro, acid-tinged western set in the ’80s

Where Love Lies Bleeding ends up — full of psychedelic visions, blood-covered bodies and more than a fair amount of screaming — is very different from where the movie starts out. 

That’s because the Kristen Stewart-led, Rose Glass-directed bodybuilding crime epic is a genre send-up in just about every way.

The film follows Lou (Stewart), a 20-something gym manager in New Mexico saddled with a homicidal, drug-smuggling dad (Ed Harris), and the ambitious but self-deluded Jackie (Katy M. O’Brian) on a rags-to-riches journey to a sort of bargain-bin Ms. Olympia.

When Jackie swings into town on her way to a Las Vegas bodybuilding competition and meets the somewhat aimless Lou (Stewart’s Twilight-reminiscent scowls and grunted dialogue clearly indicate some sort of guarded secret), Love Lies Bleeding operates well as a subdued mystery, the kind of hard-boiled drama replete with romantic overtones you might see on HBO.

But as Lou falls for Jackie, Jackie falls in with Lou’s father, and the first corpse falls off a cliff, this neo-noir shifts into something more like a neo-fantasy. While its muscle shirts, mullets and muscle cars exhaustively emphasize its 1989 setting, the unrelenting pessimism and violence the film heaps on its main characters — who are impossibly far from the American Dream — make it feel more like an acid western than a noir.

WATCH | Love Lies Bleeding trailer: 

None of our leads are good people in the way we would expect, nor are they good for one another — Lou and Jackie depend on each other in a way that only damages them and those around them, while everyone else (virtuous or evil) is figuratively, or literally, crushed beneath them. 

Everything in Love Lies Bleeding acts as a symbol for Glass’s central theme of gender and power, while the characters’ psychological journeys become far more important than any external plot. And like the movie that inspired this sub-genre— Dead Man — Glass turns the central idea of a western on its head. Instead of a journey of prosperity or fulfilment, everyone here is on a journey toward misfortune, debauchery and death.

The surreal, LSD-inspired way it does so feels like a nightmare version of Moonrise Kingdom. 

Because as those twitching muscles go from Schwarzenegger to something more like Frankenstein, the Blood Simple plan to stay one step ahead of the law devolves into something less contained, like Lord of the Flies. It’s all decorated with violence so over-the-top it might be called slapstick — if it wasn’t so disturbingly realistic. 

Violent, brutal and bizarre

Trying to move away from the restrained tone of her first feature, Saint Maud, Glass crafted Love Lies Bleeding like a gonzo head trip, one that sucks you in as a Coen Brothers-style thriller before diving into something much more experimental.

At the same time, it seems designed to subvert the superficial “strong female character” trope and look as bizarre — and therefore surely artistic — as any other A24 film while doing it. 

When it comes to bizarre, Love Lies Bleeding hits the nail on the head — along with hitting a few other blunt objects (and a few other heads). Meanwhile, the performances are for the most part impressive, especially O’Brian. Her slow-but-steady descent into smirking insanity is one of the highlights, coupled with an incredible physical performance perfected in her real-life training as a martial artist. 

While the performance may draw comparisons to the eerily similar role Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson played in Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain, O’Brian isn’t playing her part for laughs. There’s an expert desperation in how O’Brian depicts a never-quite-explained backstory — along with a seeming Attack of the 50 Foot Woman reference that lets her explore and expand Glass’s question of how and why we struggle with stories that show women as stronger than men. Love Lies Bleeding is at its strongest when exploring this theme.

As a pure adrenaline-inducing trip, it’s a fun experience. As for how well it works as a movie, it’s not perfect. The attempt to create a kaleidoscopic event film leads to more narrative leads than Glass can close up. We’re constantly buffeted by another crooked cop, another hinted-at character motivation, another rotten-toothed stalker in a way that keeps us engaged but perhaps not fully able to follow what’s going on or why.

The bait-and-switch format is an excuse for excitement. But the liberties Love Lies Bleeding takes may be a bit too much for mainstream audiences — though perhaps ideal for eventual cult-classic status.

As the focus on Jackie and Lou’s relationship morphs into something closer to a monster movie, Love Lies Bleeding could be best described as Thelma & Louise meets Pain & Gain meets No Country for Old Men — and maybe a couple of other movies you’d have to go wander to that extra room at the back of the movie rental place to find. 

But if that’s where you were headed anyway, Love Lies Bleeding isn’t a bad choice.