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****/**** starring Kristen Stewart, Katy O’Brian, Jena Malone, Ed Harris written by Rose Glass & Weronika Tofilska directed by Rose Glass
by Walter Chaw Love is like a lamb and love is like a sledgehammer. Love crawls into your head and fills the empty spaces, the canyons and tunnels and holes in between, making it so full of noise it makes you fucking nuts. It’s too big, but it keeps growing. It kills you, but it won’t let you die. Love makes every love story a tragedy. Everyone writes about love, but the only person to ever do it right was Maurice Sendak, who wrote a survival guide for the fury called Where the Wild Things Are. Therein, a little boy named Max threatens to leave his friends, monsters on an island where they all jamboree. They beg him to stay: “Please don’t go. We’ll eat you up we love you so.” And they will, you know, because they have fangs and dangerous desires and horrible appetites. Love growls and gnashes its teeth. Love’s claws rattle like castanets. Love roars. Rose Glass’s Love Lies Bleeding is a love story about two terrible women and two terrible men who do bad things to one another and for one another because love is the fire in which, happily, we burn.
Lou (Kristen Stewart) works at a gym that has fallen into filth and disrepair, the kind that attracts degenerates who buy knock-off steroids from Lou so they can move more metal around with less recovery time and bigger gains. Glass introduces this gym, Crater Gym, with slo-mo, close-up considerations of hairy chests matted with sweat, a montage scored to the propulsive synth music of Clint Mansell and strewn with glimpses of a location we’ll visit later in the film: a chasm in the desert, the milky way spiralling insensibly in the sky above like an outtake from Natural Born Killers. Suddenly, Lou is elbow-deep in a clogged toilet. Love Lies Bleeding is about buried things that want to come out. That want it so bad. Lou drives home in her truck. She feeds her cat. She jerks off on the couch, facedown, her head buried in a pillow, and this is how we learn everything we need to know about Lou. She’s an Anne Sexton poem. She’s brutally damaged and we don’t know why, though we suspect it has something to do with Lou’s dad, Lou Sr. (Ed Harris)…but she’s okay now–or, you know, she’s in the fight. Me, too. You, too?
Lou watches Jackie (Katy O’Brian) work out at the Crater, so Glass does, too, and therefore so do we. Her muscles strain against her skin like the gun pushing out of the flesh of a television set in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome. She is yoked. She is a specimen. She gets in a fight with one of the scumbag meathead regulars and takes a hard cross against her face, unfazed. She tells Lou Sr., for whom she works at his New Mexico shooting range, that she doesn’t need a gun because she trusts her strength. She is a minister in the Tabernacle of New Flesh. She is an evangelist–and she has good news to share. Lou offers to inject some of her stash into Jackie’s ass, and they fall in love so hard, so fast, it’s like a meteor, red-hot from the friction and at terminal velocity, impacting into the cooling clay of the desert at night. Jackie is a wild thing. She loves Lou so much she wants to eat her up.
Lou’s sister, poor Beth (Jena Malone), is married to abusive piece of shit JJ (Dave Franco). Beth loves JJ so much. JJ puts Beth in the hospital one day, and Lou wants to kill him, but the very scary Lou Sr. tells her to leave him alone because Beth, oh Beth, she burns hot for him. It’s important to respect love, because love is deadly once aroused. Lou Sr. doesn’t actually say that, you can just tell by the way he’s kneeling next to the bed, his hands clasped in holy genuflection, that this is what he means. Lou Sr. prays at the altar of love. It has been his religion ever since his wife left him, I think, or since he killed her. That’s never clear. It probably doesn’t matter. Love is dangerous, and sometimes it will eat you up. You are likely to be consumed by it. Love is meant to be consummated: You eat it, and it eats you, and you are lost. Jackie sees how sad Lou is and Jackie’s head, oh, her head is so full of bees. She puts on her wolf suit and makes mischief of one kind or another. She loves Lou so much that she eats JJ up, and then she runs, but Lou stays. Lou keeps the dinner hot while forests grow and grow in her rooms. The police come to ask her questions about how JJ ended up at the bottom of a chasm with only half his face left on. Lou Sr. starts asking those questions as well. Love Lies Bleeding is chaos because we starve our sense when we feed our desire. The picture is chaos because though it is many things, it’s a romance first.
Love Lies Bleeding is Blood Simple and Bound and Shallow Grave and Blue Ruin. Point Blank, too, and Hard Times and Rolling Thunder. It’s a road trip and a crime thriller, a rom-com and Pumping Iron in its fetishization of the shuddering sinew and sour sweat of human machinery. It is also vicious, a wild thing all its own, unpredictable and naive, inevitable and wise. It feels like a carpet burn right after you get it, how you look at the pink swath of it freshly debrided and watch blood well up in tiny red rubies, like magic. Like magic. There are no half-measures in this film. When it’s sexy, it’s sexy. When it’s violent, it’s sexy as fuck. At a body-building contest, in the middle of a routine in which Jackie ecstatically strikes the poses of her Church of Meat affectations, she births Lou in an amniotic sludge, vomits her out in the way of Greek Gods and the fully-formed eruptions of their offspring. We understand her body’s rejection of precious Lou as what happens when the pain of a lover’s betrayal feels like a physical insult. We understand it as jealousy. And in the middle of Lou engaged in an Oedipal split from Lou Sr., we watch Jackie expand to take her lover in again. Love forgives. Love has a lot to be forgiven for. When Lou Sr. is at his angriest, he literally eats what he loves the most, a thing he has raised from a grub and doted upon in the way love has instructed him. You will think Love Lies Bleeding is strange, and you will wonder how it is this strange movie knows you so well. Love Lies Bleeding is about you, you see. How you fell in love once and burned in it until all that was left was the ash of you. And an ocean tumbled by, and you sailed off through night and day and in and out of weeks and almost over a year to where the wild things are. Still are. I’ll see you there.
