Love Lies Bleed­ing – first-look review

At the cli­max of David Fincher’s Gone Girl, in a con­fronta­tion with her hus­band long after her care­ful­ly con­struct­ed mask has peeled off, Amy Dunne utters the immor­tal line ​“I’ve killed for you. Who else can say that?” The same sen­ti­ment runs through Rose Glass and Weroni­ka Tofilska’s lead-filled Love Lies Bleed­ing, about the lengths two women are will­ing to go to in a heady, delu­sion­al quest to prove their devo­tion. Through a sheen of sweat, blood and steroids, the intox­i­cat­ing, all-con­sum­ing impact of Lou (Kris­ten Stew­art) and Jackie’s (Katy O’Brian) whirl­wind romance will have last­ing con­se­quences on the New Mex­i­co town where Lou’s bug-obsessed gun-run­ning father (Ed Har­ris) rules with an iron fist.

If her fea­ture debut Saint Maud was an aus­tere slow-burn, Glass’s sec­ond fea­ture is a Molo­tov cock­tail: hot, dirty, fast, com­bustible. Orphaned Okla­homan Jack­ie blows into town on her way to the world body­build­ing cham­pi­onships in Las Vegas – she lands a tem­po­rary gig wait­ress­ing at the gun range oper­at­ed by Lou Sr and his dirt­bag son-in-law JJ (Dave Fran­co). Her obses­sive exer­cise rou­tine quick­ly brings her to the atten­tion of Lou Jr, who spots her pump­ing iron among the gym rats who pop­u­late the space she man­ages. Instant­ly smit­ten, Lou offers Jack­ie some of the steroids favoured by her male cus­tomers. ​“Just to give you that extra kick,” she assures a slight­ly hes­i­tant Jackie.

That extra kick looks like this: the post-work­out burn of lac­tic acid build-up; omelettes care­ful­ly made with just the whites; hot, fast, dirty bath­room sex; the explo­sive desire to fight back against the vio­lence of misog­y­ny no mat­ter what the cost. Stew­art and O’Brian’s chem­istry is elec­tric – besot­ted with each oth­er almost instant­ly, their love burns like mag­ne­sium, incan­des­cent and dan­ger­ous. Soon enough Jack­ie can’t bear to see Lou cowed under the boot of her mon­strous broth­er-in-law and father any­more. Juiced up and whit­ed out, she takes mat­ters into her own hands – and that’s when the body count starts to rise.

With a pound­ing Clint Mansell score and Ben Fordesman’s sat­u­rat­ed, lus­cious cin­e­matog­ra­phy, Love Lies Bleed­ing embraces the pulpy spir­it of its 1989 small-town Amer­i­ca set­ting. While the Berlin Wall tum­bles on the tele­vi­sion, there’s a grow­ing sense that Jack­ie and Lou’s love could have a sim­i­lar­ly earth-shat­ter­ing pow­er. If you go in for easy com­par­isons, it’s Thel­ma & Louise by way of The Out­siders and Blood Sim­ple chan­nelling Arnold Schwarzeneg­ger, but the les­bian rela­tion­ship which is the lit­er­al and metaphor­i­cal heart of the film puts Love Lies Bleed­ing in a class of its own, unapolo­get­i­cal­ly and explic­it­ly queer in a way that feels lib­er­at­ing and tantalising.

Con­sid­er­ing how rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent Love Lies Bleed­ing is from Saint Maud, Glass already appears chameleon­ic and uncom­pro­mis­ing in her film­mak­ing vision. Fre­net­ic and obses­sive, this is still a love sto­ry amid the gore and slick of body oil – a heart-pound­ing, iron-pump­ing descent into the heady heart of obses­sion and desire.