Love Lies Bleeding – A Wild Yet Flawed Ride

There was perhaps no more hyped film coming into this year’s Sundance Film Festival than the follow-up from writer/director Rose Glass’ sensational Saint Maud. And for the most part, Love Lies Bleeding lived up that hype, delivering a gritty and stylized thriller led by Kristen Stewart. A wild ride running dangerously close to falling off the rails as it keeps audiences on the edge of their seats, it comes off thin as it lacks enough compelling narrative tissue to tie it all together. While some will inevitably connect to the film more (or less) than others, and it’s easy to see why, there is little to no support for what it wants to do here. Nevertheless, the final product is an effort whose parts outweigh their sum. On the surface, it may look good and sound good, and Stewart, Katy O’Brian, Dave Franco, and Ed Harris all shine in their own twisted ways and help to make up for the areas where the film lacks. Ultimately, where it truly fails is whenever one ventures to dive below the surface and finds that there is very little to be had.

Love Lies Bleeding follows Lou (Stewart), a New Mexico gym manager with a complicated past who falls in love with Jackie (O’Brian), an amateur bodybuilder passing through her hometown on the way to a competition in Las Vegas. For the latter, what was merely a stop on her journey, where she could train before moving on, quickly became so much more as she found herself entangled in the drama between Lou and her family, led by her shady father Lou Sr. (Harris), sister Beth (Jena Malone), and brother in-law JJ (Franco). Currently estranged from her father, the only thing keeping Lou around was her concern for her sister, living with an allegedly abusive husband. Lou’s past history with her father and the nature of her troubled family dynamic went largely unexplored as did her relationship with Jackie as the two subplots then found themselves battling each other while also serving each other without being deep enough individually to work together and set up the ending in a satisfying way.

When Lou and Jackie first met, there was an undeniable connection there and that connection evolved into something more. They cared for one another as they made the other not feel like they were alone anymore, Lou in her hometown and Jackie in life as the latter hitchhiked from stop to stop looking for purpose and validation for her choice to become a bodybuilder. For once in their lives, there was hope but before that could be realized, they inevitably had some hurdles to contend with first. Working on her body and becoming bodybuilder as a means for Jackie to stand up for herself, Lou would have to do the same and stand up to her father. Jumping back into the world she thought she left behind and shaking that hornet’s nest did not exactly come without circumstances as Lou, Jackie, and their relationship were put to the test. Though the story does do a decent job at creating some suspense, that emotional connection with the story and characters wasn’t there, making the film simply feel like a series of scenes. That being said, those scenes are still entertaining even though it takes some time for anything of note to happen.

However, the lack of character development takes away from the ability of these moments to resonate as much as the film hoped they would. As mentioned, it has some style to it. Full of flourishes, they may have looked and sounded cool but they didn’t add too much to the film, other than reinforcing the film’s tense atmosphere. Above all else, the imagery that most audiences are likely to remember after watching it is the shots of Jackie taking charge and visibly bulking up as a response to the story’s particularly tense moments. It’s just a shame that these moments didn’t mean more. In the end, for what Love Lies Bleeding lacked narratively, they made up for in performances with the aforementioned Stewart leading the way. She was a force, despite having to balance too much between her relationship with Jackie and her relationship with Lou Sr. and the rest of her family. Lou’s longing for connection and her struggle under the weight of her many internal conflicts was there to see and was compelling to watch. Meanwhile, O’Brian was a literal force and given the meatiest role as Jackie, a lost woman whose values were put to the test thanks to her relationship with Lou. In limited roles, Harris and Franco were the thinnest expressions of shady with Harris’ screen presence at least helping to somewhat pull it off.

Overall, Love Lies Bleeding is a wild yet flawed ride that does enough to keep audiences on the edge of their seats but not enough to have them care.

still courtesy of VVS Films

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Keith Noakes

The EIC of the coincidentally-named keithlovesmovies.com. A Canadian who prefers to get out of the cold and into the warmth of a movie theatre.