Love Lies Bleeding

Grade: B-

Love Lies Bleeding arrives into the world soon after the similarly-titled Bleeding Love, and the two-women-attracted-to-each-other-on-a-road-trip business made me think of Drive-Away Dolls. Love Lies Bleeding is the best of the three. Director Rose Glass bathes the movie in a retro-80s tinge. It’s not completely successful, but I admired many aspects of it, and even found myself disappointed that there was only a certain amount of minutes left, as I looked at my watch. At its best, it has a hum and a rhythm that I found infectious.

A murder happens. Obviously, that complicates things, and the characters try to kill their way out of their problems, until it’s all good. I wonder if that’s ever really worked out. The handful of people we get to know are connected in unbelievably coincidental ways, but I’ll allow the film its premise. It’s 1989. Kristen Stewart stars as Lou, who manages a small gym. Into town rolls Jackie (Katy O’Brian). She has aspirations of entering a bodybuilding competition. She shows up at Lou’s place of employment to work out. They like each other, and begin to live together. Jackie becomes subject to large roid rage fits from the illegal enhancement medication Lou provides her. Lou’s sister Beth (Jena Malone from Nocturnal Animals and the Hunger Games series) has an abusive husband, JJ (Dave Franco). Lou and Jackie don’t like him, and wish he would go away.

There’s a remote location the family has used to make problems go away for at least a generation. It’s a deep ravine out in the desert, that serves as the home of underdeveloped backstory plot points. JJ disappears somewhere. Characters do things of a magnitude they previously had never reached. There is an abundance of red in the cinematography, with unclear dreamlike half-flashbacks that don’t always have a discernible point or a payoff.

Kristen Stewart can be hit-or-miss as an actress. I liked her in Still Alice and the Twilight films, but I didn’t think Spencer had any business near an Oscar nomination – but she’s quite good in Love Lies Bleeding. She’s just right for what the role calls for. Ed Harris – male-pattern bald with long, shoulder-length hair, looking like an elderly Yanni with a vicious hangover – is a hoot as Stewart’s estranged father, who has cleaned up some messes in his time. He’s a weird dude. In a bit that didn’t work for me, he suddenly eats a bug for no reason. Anna Barishnikov (Manchester By the Sea) doesn’t have many credits, but I hope her memorable turn here gets her more work.

This is one of the sloppier endings I’ve seen recently. Genre-wise, it tries to pull itself into a couple directions it previously hadn’t gone – and since it didn’t explore those avenues before, I have a hard time accepting these new parameters. Somebody recovers from an injury awfully well, the last scene has to rely on the luck of no other cars driving by in broad daylight, and there’s an utterly bizarre unexplained transformation. You’ll know it when you see it. Nevertheless, I’d rather see a sloppy movie that lives and breathes and strives for something than one that plays it safe with the same old two step. Love Lies Bleeding fails sometimes, but at least it tried things I didn’t see coming.

Grade: B-