Lou (Kristen Stewart) is heading to her truck after closing the gym for the night when she finds Jackie (Katy O’Brian) getting into a fight in the parking lot out back.  She brings Jackie back inside and, learning that she has been hitchhiking from Oklahoma to Las Vegas for a bodybuilding competition, she proposes that she spend the night.  The two women careen headfast into a relationship, but when Lou discovers that Jackie has been working at her father’s, also a Lou (Ed Harris), gun range and restaurant, she urges Jackie to find other employment or risk being caught up in a criminal web which Lou has spent her whole life trying to get out of. 

Writer/director Rose Glass returns to distributor A24 for her sophomore feature, Love Lies Bleeding, cowritten with Weronika Tofilska.  The film debuted at Sundance before embarking on some of the other early-year festivals and quickly made its way to general audiences. Running 104 minutes, the 1989-set dusty noir has all the energy of a live wire thanks to Stewart and O’Brian heading up a great ensemble of eccentric characters, Mark Towns’ confidently chaotic editing, Ben Fordesman’s disorienting insert shots, and Clint Mansell’s alien score. 

The film opens with just a fire hose blast of narrative information as audiences are washed over by a torrent of character names, locations, a vague sense of time and place, and just as we start to begin to reconcile who Lou is, as she cleans a toilet and dodges the advances of ex-flame Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov), we get tossed into the cab of JJ’s (Dave Franco) car just as he is finishing his hookup with Jackie.  We then follow Jackie for a while as she is introduced by JJ to Lou Sr. where she is offered a job as a waitress.  It is not until Jackie collides with Lou later that day at the gym that we slowly start to piece things together.  Lou offers the bodybuilder some steroids before returning together to her house, and in the morning over an omelet, we, at the very least, have a better idea of the character dynamic at work here. Baryshnikov and Harris also deliver some great, scenery-chewing performances that help to flavor the world which Glass will begin to explore more deeply. 

Once established, Love Lies Bleeding is far more coherent than the noir template normally requires its films to be.  Sure, a lot of details are waved off as unnecessary so that the world does not feel as full as it would in a more standard procedural, but the artistry in the production design – led here by Katie Hickman – helps to greatly establish the world of the film where there were gaps on the page.  Once these rules are defined, though, Glass begins to have some fun, instructing the camera to come extremely close on Jackie’s veins and muscles as the steroids hit, her muscles ripple almost bursting out of the skin.  She gets her audience fluent in this filmic language before pushing the boundaries ever further showing Jackie growing larger and larger until she inhumanly towers across the frame.  It is a bold move for a story that is mostly tied to reality to embrace such flourishes, but for audiences that are willing to roll with the punches, the almost-absurd finale of the film that heavily relies on this larger-than-life imagery will be more poignant than humorous. 

Some 100 years into what modern audiences would see and recognize as a film, and after a millennium of telling stories, it becomes necessary for filmmakers – some of our modern storytellers – to find new and inventive ways to adapt the templates and push the narrative forward.  One way they do this is by blending multiple sensibilities together.  In the case of Love Lies Bleeding, it blends the structure and archetypes of noir with the style of the 1980s and the modern acceptance and hunger for queer stories.  This is how you subvert expectations far more than a simple race or gender-swapped story to check off on the proverbial diversity checklist.  The queerness of the story is stitched into the very fabric of the film, shifting the character dynamics to fit the template while still maintaining some authenticity to the characters.   

In this instance, Jackie is the most versatile character filling most immediately the role of the femme fatale as the newcomer on the scene, but that does not mean that Lou is the traditional gumshoe.  While the “goal” of the film is to indict Lou Sr., Stewart’s Lou already knows all the dark secrets hidden in the canyon.  It is in this subtle shift that Love Lies Bleeding is able to lean so heavily on the time-tested form while at the same time feeling so bold, exciting, and in a word, fresh.  There is no real mystery that Lou Sr. Is a bad man, and while the details of his crimes do remain more or less hidden – the film is not really interested in delving down the dramatic route, here – we still have far more clarity and texture of what kind of danger Lou is in than we tend to when following the characters upon which she is based.  Love Lies Bleeding becomes more of a rescue mission than a true mystery as Lou tries to free her new girlfriend from the clutches of her gang boss father and shake the old flame that will turn her in in a heartbeat.   

On one hand, we end the film really not knowing or caring to know about the details of the many bodies found in the canyon; the same canyon which Lou and Jackie send JJ’s corpse down after he beat Lou’s sister, his wife, Beth (Jena Malone).  On the other hand, the film does seem to wrap up a little quickly.  These characters come firing at each other from four different directions all at once, and for a film that has built up such tension, an explosion as seen is not to be unexpected, but it still leaves us feeling a little cold.  We want more time in the end game than we are given because the stakes have been so meticulously laid that the conclusion, in its incredible brevity, feels like an afterthought.  While in life, even the most elaborate domino setup may collapse in mere seconds, in film, we have the luxury of suspending and splitting time, and Glass has proven to know how to manipulate this element in the second act while unfortunately favoring a rapid-fire conclusion.  There is certainly some interstitial material and a longer scene between the two Lous gathering dust on the cutting room floor, and we the audiences are burned by that decision.  To digress a moment, this is more of a systemic problem that is often the case with films in that 100-minute range; too complex to be sheared down to 90 minutes or less, but deep enough that anything less than 120 comes with some glaring pacing or omission issues.  This tithing of the third act is the sacrifice that filmmakers make at the altar of the corporate gods, all in the name of marketability. 

Love Lies Bleeding is still a riotous good time, unapologetic in its storytelling and led by a fearless duo of Stewart and O’Brian.  Glass has again modernized a beloved template, bringing it to new life for a new audience. The film is not making any grandstand positions, but simply allowing its characters on the fringe to exist.  It is well made but has the scrappy feeling of an early Coen Brothers’ film, though does not lean in quite as much to the more bizarre bits of human nature that often fascinated the Coens. One can be forgiven for waiting for a UFO to land – a metaphor for the alienation that Lou feels in her own family – given the texture of the score, at least one major cut away to the starry sky, and the store being set in the Nevada desert, but Love Lies Bleeding does not need to show us anything spectacular for us to sympathize with Lou, and Glass’ simplistic way into the story is probably its biggest strength.  It is not overdone, we are not overwhelmed by the times Glass does get a little playful, and it still tells a full and complete story about two girls desperate to make their own freedom.