We exist in a cinema age of references, rehashed ideas, and reused tropes. These things are thicker than they used to be, but the critiques and complaints about their ubiquity are often too blunt. What’s overlooked is their function in cinema, the way stock characters and deliberately framed moments utilize film language to convey things to the audience quickly. Everyone has agreed to these shortcuts. That’s what language is. What audiences ask in return are twists on the staples to make the whole seem lively and fresh.
Few films balance blunt tropes and fresh twists as well as Love Lies Bleeding, which is at once an ode to rough-and-tumble American tragedies and a biting indictment of the men who create these toxic cesspools. And yes, it’s pretty gay.
Set in a small town somewhere between nowhere and goodbye, gym manager Lou (Kristen Stewart) meets aspiring bodybuilder Jackie (Katy O’Brian). Jackie is passing through on her way to a competition in Vegas, where a win could catapult her into…a stable job as a trainer and a roof over her head. In the meantime, she’s relying on the goodwill and sexual reciprocity of strangers to keep going, and she and Lou’s genuine attraction brings about a reprieve from the daily hustle.
The town is run by Lou’s father, Lou Sr. (Ed Harris), who ostensibly owns a gun range, but his power comes from less reputable business. Under his watchful, merciless eye, his other daughter, Beth (Jena Malone), languishes in an abusive marriage.
Beth’s inability to get out of her marriage is no fault of her own, but rather an amplification of the situation they all find themselves in. Lou Sr. has turned the town into a world no one escapes from, a tragedy Jackie doesn’t discover until far too enmeshed in all their lives.
This story would traditionally be of fathers and sons, with generational sins eating through bloodlines as surely as Lou Sr.’s receding hairline and wiry frame personifies the rot and decay. Again, this is a story of tropes. Lou Sr. oozes trashy bad guy mystique. It’s laid on so thick that his disregard for his daughter’s gender and sexuality doesn’t earn him any points. You don’t have to be a bigot to be an awful guy, says Love Lies Bleeding.
The younger Lou is the classic son on the edge. She’s been selected to carry on the family legacy, but for now, she’s fighting her fate. She only needs a nudge to fall into it, and Jackie proves to be a hell of a nudge. Whether she’ll push Lou into her father or away from him is fascinatingly unclear throughout the film. On the one hand, she’s a ripped, rock-solid force that could be strong enough to keep the overwhelming forces at bay. On the other, she’s an insecure, fragile person being tossed about by circumstance. The film breaks from reality to show this dichotomy, a choice that adds fascinating imagery but doesn’t quite gel with the rest of the film. The world director and co-writer Rose Glass created is already mythic in its own right. Making Jackie an, ahem, giant figure overly twists its message, which was already robust enough.
That is a minor quibble, though, as the movie otherwise is a masterful dance between filmmaker and audience. Glass knows the things we’ve been trained to see, but she also knows the things we’ve been trained not to see. The movie’s stylish swings get people to react, and in doing so every chuckle and gasp becomes a tell on the individual watching it. There’s rarely a moment when the entire theater erupts. Instead, spattered reactions reveal divisions in how we see the same images. Because, in the end, we don’t speak the same film language. Even the most educated among us, spouting interpretations based on a thorough knowledge of film history, is working with a language made by and for a monolithic subset of people.
Love Lies Bleeding tricks you into thinking it’s in that monolith. It pummels you with recognizable traditions, so much so that it’s easy to ignore the queer, feminist text that it is. Be lured in at your own peril. Glass always has a sucker punch lying in wait, one that will make you swallow your tongue for thinking anything about this tale as old as time is fun.
Release: Available now in theaters
Director: Rose Glass
Writers: Rose Glass, Weronika Tofilska
Cast: Kristen Stewart, Katy O’Brian, Ed Harris, Jena Malone, Dave Franco, Anna Baryshnikov
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