Illustration by Michael DiMilo
Killing Me Softly: Film Review of Love Lies Bleeding
★★★★ 1/2
By Geoff Carter
Film noir, which never really left us, is undergoing a radical transformation. From its beginnings in classics like Double Indemnity, The Big Sleep, Laura, The Killers, and—more recently—Body Heat and Chinatown, we have taken that long dark highway from that place to new the newer noir: films like Mulholland Drive, Shutter Island, Nightcrawler, and LA Confidential.
Of course, through the wonders of remakes, reimaginings, and rehashes, classics like Nightmare Alley or Cape Fear can be compared to the originals to get a sense of how cultural sensibilities have changed. For instance, the differences between Robert Mitchum and Robert DeNiro’s psychotic villain Max Purdy speaks volumes about the cultures—the times—from which they sprang. Martin Scorsese’s 1991 version is splashier, sexier, more violent, and more extreme. The scene in which DeNiro seduces Juliette Lewis in her high school auditorium is chilling—harrowing. The 1962 original seems tame by comparison. It seems obvious that today’s audiences are either more sophisticated or more desensitized to the extremes of the new and improved noir.
Rose Glass’s new film Love Lies Bleeding is a prime example of the new noir. It is a steamy and gritty tale that is—in the film noir tradition—sophisticated, hardboiled, and suspenseful, but which is also steamy, surreal, and has a decidedly feminist bent.
The film opens as Lou Langston (Kristen Stewart) a reticent and disaffected manager of a rundown gym is fixing a clogged toilet. She gently rebuffs her clingy would-be girlfriend Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov) before heading home to her seedy apartment. Lou is visited by the FBI who are interested in investigating Lou’s father.
Meanwhile, Jackie (Katy O’Brian), a female bodybuilder on her way to Vegas for a competition, rolls into town. Through her considerable charms, she gets a job at the local shooting range through J.J. (Dave Franco), who happens to be Lou’s abusive brother-in-law. After meeting the owner, who happens to be Lou’s father and a notorious gunrunner Lou senior (Ed Harris) whose character bears an uncanny resemblance to Riff Raff in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Jackie goes to the gym and meets Lou, who is smitten with her.
She offers Jackie some steroids to help with her bodybuilding program—warning her to go slow, and the two soon become lovers. When she learns she has nowhere else to go, Lou invites Jackie to stay in her apartment where their relationship eventually moves from torrid to infatuated to obsessed.
While at her sister’s house to help with the kids, Lou sees that her sister Beth (Jena Malone) has been beaten up by her husband J.J. Again. Lou warns Beth that sooner or later she’s going to end up dead at J.J.’s hands and then tells her brother-in-law she’ll kill him if he touches Beth again. J.J. retorts that Jackie slept with him to get a job. Lou confronts Jackie with the information. They fight and Jackie tells Lou she loves her. They make up.
The next morning Lou gets the call that J.J. has put Beth in the hospital. Furious, she asks her father, the original Lou, for help. He simply says he’ll talk to J.J. Jackie, feeling the side effects of the steroids, takes Lou’s truck over to J.J.’s house and kills him. Lou discovers the murder and finds Jackie in a stupor. They dispose of the body in a vast ravine outside of town, a ravine that happens to be the location of a skeletons in the family closet. It turns out that Lou’s dad is mixed up in the gun-running business and has taken care of some disagreeable associates there.
Things get messy for Lou when Daisy sees her and Jackie driving J.J.’s car out of town and asks what they’re doing. As in all good noir films, from Double Indemnity to The Postman Always Rings Twice to Farewell, My Lovely to Blood Simple to Body Heat, the aftermath of murders tend to get complicated. Greed, double crosses, unexpected witnesses, cold feet, and—of course—the treacherous femme fatale make it almost impossible to get away with murder.
Love Lies Bleeding has taken a modern and fascinating twist on the traditional noir narrative tropes. Since the two main characters Lou and Jackie are women—and lovers, they alternately take on the roles of femme fatale, victim, and criminal. And through their commitment to each other, they gain the power necessary to find a place where they can find their place and live together in peace. Almost. Again, as in most noir films (but especially Coen Brothers vehicles), there is a very unexpected twist–one of many–at the end.
Rose Glass has created a wonderfully gritty and steamy thriller. From the opening sequences as the camera rises from a vast, red-tinged chasm in the New Mexico desert to its penetration of Lou’s gym and its incursion into J.J.’s truck, the opening sequences promise a more than typical thriller. It looks pulpy, surreal, and menacing at the same time.
Glass and co-writer Weronika Tofilska give nods to the traditions of the genre. Like most noir heroes, Lou is embittered, wry, and skeptical but not completely cynical. She tries to be nice to the eminently annoying Daisy and is still trying to give up smoking. Jackie is built from the mold of the femme fatale, but instead of her body being simply a sex object—which it is—it also doubles as her strength and the tool she will use for self-realization.
Ed Nelson’s Lou, Sr. tiptoes the line between malevolence and cliché. He collects and plays with insect larva while cutting gun sales to Mexican cartels. His appearance is striking enough to cause the audience to wonder whether the writers are being ironic or merely playful. Other tropes of the genre abound: the body wrapped in a rug behind the couch, the cops knocking on the door at the wrong time, and a body that won’t stay dead, yet Jackie is a character that allows Glass to cover some new ground.
Jackie is a woman seeking fulfillment through the vehicle of her body. Not just sexually, but also through sheer strength of will, and—with the help of some steroids—physical dominance. This journey toward self-fulfillment and power takes a surprisingly criminal yet righteous turn when Jackie helps Lou out with the J.J. problem. Afterwards, at the bodybuilding tournament, when the steroids take over and Jackie flips into a drug-induced violent jag, all bets are off.
The final sequence—while echoing the surreal overtones of the introduction, is a nod to the power of solidarity. And then—of course—things take a violent and unexpected turn.
Love Lives Bleeding is a great watch. It is a gritty and powerful crime tale yet provides enough clever twists and surreal side trips to make it a memorable viewing experience.