By Sandra Hall
LOVE LIES BLEEDING ★★★½
(MA) 104 minutes
It’s a toss up as to which is the most horrifying image in Love Lies Bleeding. It could be the man with half his face smashed in, but my money is on the sight of Ed Harris’ bottom-heavy hairstyle. He’s bald on top with a grey curtain draped across his back and shoulders – a tonsorial arrangement that makes him look like he’s stepped straight out of Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream.
Katy O’Brian (left), and Kristen Stewart as lovers Jackie and Lou in the psychological horror Love Lies Bleeding.
The film is directed and co-written by Rose Glass, the latest hot talent to spring up in that very trendy genre of psychological horror. Glass is adept at ultra-violence lightly lacquered with black farce – and when she really wants to kick the action into high gear, she lathers on a potent measure of the bizarre. You can tell she’s on the right track from the tone of the audience’s laughter. It’s imbued with the explosive mixture of glee and revulsion that signifies horror fans are having a great time.
She’s British, but her confident feel for place and period could probably take her anywhere. In this one, she sets us down in the 1980s in a dust-ridden, neon-lit hellhole in the New Mexico desert. Here, Kristen Stewart’s Lou is running a dingy but well-patronised gym owned by Harris as her father, Lou Sr, the local gangster and gun-runner. She detests him, but refuses to give the FBI the evidence it needs to bring him in.
If I call the film Thelma & Louise on steroids, I’m not really perpetrating a cliche, since the steroids are a fact. Lou gives them as a gift to her new lover, Jackie (Katy O’Brian), an aspiring bodybuilder who’s hitchhiking to Las Vegas to compete in her first big contest. She stops off at the gym for some extra training, a decision she may regret as the body count begins to mount, although it’s hard to tell once the steroids go to work.
The mayhem begins when Lou’s sister Beth (Jena Malone) is almost beaten to death by her husband, JJ (Dave Franco), whose mullet is in limp competition with Harris’s hairdo. He’s a very unsavoury character clearly headed for a nasty end, but this doesn’t prepare you for the final spectacle, which confirms Glass’s rising reputation as an artist in the macabre.
And she doesn’t stop there. The steroids are responsible for a couple of scenes I’ll find very hard to forget and Lou Sr, an ardent entomologist, adds another touch of the baroque in a scene that has him expressing his fury and frustration by eating an especially indigestible member of his bug collection.
O’Brian, who’s an actor and martial arts expert, delivers a performance that rapidly accelerates from good-natured charm to unstoppable rage. She becomes a tightly bound ball of muscular energy, while Stewart looks like she’s unravelling fast under the strain. Stewart has matured into such a fine actor, you can only imagine she must have spent most of her role in the Twilight series on autopilot.
In theory, the film has feminist credentials. It’s Lou and Jackie against the evils of the patriarchy. It could also be read as a darkly humorous cautionary tale about the abuse of steroids, but Glass is more interested in style than content. She’s concentrating on the visceral effects to be created along the way rather than the destination itself. There’s more horror than psychology here, but if that’s your taste, this is for you.
Love Lies Bleeding is released in cinemas on March 14.
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