Love Lies Bleeding at Hyde Park Picture House
Tom Grieve, Cinema Editor
Full of grotesque details, black comedy and scuzzy violence, it feels like British director Rose Glass (Saint Maud) is having a ball as she heads stateside for her proudly queer and horny new neo-noir. Love Lies Bleeding stars Kristen Stewart as Lou, an outcast gym manager in small-town America, and Katy O’Brian as the transient bodybuilder who catches her attention and when she stops in town on her way to a competition in Las Vegas.
Both leads are terrific, their sweaty chemistry coming to the fore as their characters bond over syringes of steroids and a mutual disdain for the leering men in their orbit, and quickly fall into a dangerous romance. Trouble comes courtesy of Lou’s criminal family, including her abusive brother-in-law (Dave Franco) and her father, a memorably decrepit local crime boss and owner of the local gun range, played by Ed Harris.
Glass makes good use of a pulsating score from composer Cliff Martinez, combining it with neon-drenched Americana, oogling shots of O’Brian’s glistening physique, and pulpy plot beats. Her influences are perhaps too obvious, and there’s that sense of a Brit let loose in a flashy American sandbox for the first time, but Glass wrangles enough of her own surreal surprises and distinct, disreputable textures into Love Lies Bleeding, that any excesses are easily forgiven and forgotten.
