The temperature’s rising in Lou’s steroid-juiced corner of late 1980s New Mexico. The minute this restless gym manager played by Kristen Stewart spies the new bodybuilder in town, a drifter named Jackie played by Katy O’Brian, “Love Lies Bleeding” can’t wait to slake her thirst.
In film noir terms, Lou (short for Louise) can’t quite believe her luck, or her eyes. Who is this magnetic Oklahoma stranger heading to Las Vegas for a bodybuilding competition, with biceps to match her ambitions? That’s the thing about a sexual powder keg, always handy in film noir: You set up the dangerous attraction between two people, start lighting matches, and your movie’s off and running.
Everyone harbors secrets in “Love Lies Bleeding,” Lou included. She’s living a grubby, hemmed-in life and has a deep, tight-lipped grudge against her father, also named Lou. He’s played by Ed Harris, whose steroidal mullet of a wig deserves co-billing. Lou Sr. owns the gym as well as the local gun club and shooting range and, like Lou, he’s well aware of the abuse Lou’s sister (Jena Malone) endures at the hands of her slimy husband (Dave Franco). He is this town’s Big Daddy. Metaphorically and literally, he knows where the bodies are buried.
The film’s director Rose Glass, co-writing with Weronika Tofilska, deploys elements of familiar blueprints going back to James M. Cain and “The Postman Always Rings Twice” and further, to Dashiell Hammett’s “dirty town” prototype in “Red Harvest” nearly a century ago. In “Love Lies Bleeding,” though, the filmmaker risks huge leaps into the fantastic, in which Jackie’s rage, or ecstasy, triggers otherwise-hidden powers. (It’s sometimes effective, sometimes less so, and I’ve said enough.) Maybe it’s her steroid intake, maybe it’s overactive empathy she feels for Stewart’s Lou. The film doesn’t care about pinning down the physiological causes, only the effects.
The movie’s second half has more violence than sex, which is the way of most noirs. Whether you buy the movie’s destination and how it gets there, it’s pretty bracing. Also pretty graphic, though director Glass — as she did in her impressive, clammy feature debut “Saint Maud” — has a way of keeping the brutality personal rather than recreational.
Stewart and O’Brian are terrific together on screen, even if director Glass shortchanges them in some ways. After setting things up simply and well, with love scenes that (for once) don’t look like perfume ads, “Love Lies Bleeding” gets a little thin, and slightly wonky in the pacing. In three-act screenplay structure terms, the first act jumps straight to Act 3, without fleshing out the middle.
But chemistry can make up for any number of limitations. Stewart, whose screen presence always contains elements of itchy, scratchy impatience, turns out to be just right for noir, where nobody’s satisfied, or safe. The story’s late ’80s details, from AIDS warnings to news reports of the Berlin Wall falling to the whole “get fit!” body culture, point to a specific place and time.
Yet noir, when it works, insulates its characters from the outside world, until circumstances dictate they bust loose. I wish the busting-loose part went further in “Love Lies Bleeding.” But Stewart, subtle and fierce, and O’Brian, sinewy and fiercer, prove exceptional at hitting two or three notes at once, and never obviously.
“Love Lies Bleeding” — 3 stars (out of 4)
MPA rating: R (for violence and grisly images, sexual content, nudity, language throughout and drug use)
Running time: 1:44
How to watch: Premieres in theaters March 14.
Phillips is a Tribune critic.
