Format: Streaming video from HBO Max on gigantic television.
I am someone who has a lot of hard and fast habits, but not a lot of hard and fast rules. There are a few solid rules that tend to work really well for me, though. One of the rules that does work for me is that if you find something that manopshere podcasters and gym bros hate, it’s almost certainly going to be something great. Case in point: Kristen Stewart. Because of the popularity of the Twilight series among teen girls for years, Stewart, much like Taylor Swift and boy bands, became the focus of intense hatred of guys who seem to do everything specifically to impress other men. So when a film like Love Lies Bleeding shows up, they’re going to hate it by rote without looking.
It's such a weird way to live, and it seems to be only Kristen Stewart who gets this treatment from those films. Robert Pattinson, Michael Sheen, Anna Kendrick, Edi Gathegi, Rami Malek, Graham Greene…all of them emerged unscathed eventually (okay, maybe not Taylor Lautner). But Kristen Stewart has been doing interesting work for the last decade, and Love Lies Bleeding, made by Rose Glass, who also directed Saint Maud, is a great case in point.
Gym manager Lou (Stewart) lives in the ass-end of New Mexico, estranged from her father, Lou Sr. (Ed Harris), but still connected to her sister Beth (Jena Malone) despite Beth’s abusive husband JJ (Dave Franco). Lou Sr. runs a gun range and also has a number of criminal connections, which means that law enforcement and the FBI are constantly sniffing around them. Things change when Jack (Katy O’Brian) rolls into town. Needing a job, Jack has sex with JJ, who points her to Lou Sr. for a job.
Jack is a budding bodybuilder, so she naturally shows up at Lou’s gym, and Lou is immediately attracted to her. Lou offers Jack steroids to help with her training, and the two are quickly an item. Jack is training for a competition in Las Vegas, and for a few blissful days, Lou’s and Jack’s time is spent working, lifting, taking steroids, and having sex.
Things change again when Beth ends up in the hospital after being beaten by JJ. An enraged Jack goes to Beth and JJ’s house and beats JJ to death with her bare hands (although a coffee table helps out a bit as well). Needing to protect her, Lou and Jack take the body out to the desert, light JJs car on fire, and drop it into a ravine. What we learn eventually is that that ravine is precisely where Lou Sr. dumps the bodies of his victims. This does not happen by chance. One of the reasons that Lou no longer talks to her father is that when she was younger, she helped him not just get rid of bodies, but sometimes killed them as well. All of this is further complicated by the presence of Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov), who sees Lou driving JJ’s car and who will do anything for her own relationship with Lou.
Love Lies Bleeding is a modern film noir, and it’s a damned good one. It’s got everything that you would want in this style of film: sex, romance, drug use, murder, self-preservation, desperation, crime, and even some truly bizarre fantasy sequences.
I like Kristen Stewart. Ever since she has dug herself out from the Twilight franchise, she has been free to pursue the sorts of projects that she wants to pursue, and while her choices haven’t always been good ones, they have at least been honest ones. Love Lies Bleeding is one of her better choices, and that’s saying a lot about the person who made Personal Shopper and Spenser.
Everything in this film works on all cylinders. Stewart is flawless, as is Katy O’Brian. Stewart’s performance is marked by worry and stress, O’Brian’s by intensity and near-insanity. But everyone here is great. The screenplay is also one of the better ones of the last few years, especially for this style of film. This is a film that the Coens could have written easily, or that would feel at home in the early career of Taylor Sheridan. This is a script that Tarantino wishes he could write, but he’d be too busy dropping in references to obscure music to show the audience how smart he is.
Films like Love Lies Bleeding are why I do the Oscar posts each January and February and why I started that project in the first place. There’s no good reason that this should have been roundly ignored for the 2024 Oscars. Say what you will about the cast (all of them are great and I could argue nominations for three of them), but at the very least, this is a screenplay that should be talked about in the same heady atmosphere as all of the nominees.
Track this one down. You won’t be sorry.
Why to watch Love Lies Bleeding: Murder, mayhem, muscles, and more.
Why not to watch: You’re one of those people with an irrational hatred of Kristen Stewart.
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