Love Lies Bleeding

Lou is a lonely gym manager who falls hard for Jackie, a drifter passing through town on her way to Las Vegas to pursue her bodybuilding dreams. Their love soon leads to violence as they get pulled into the web of Lou's small town desert rat criminal family.

At first, Love Lies Bleeding seems like it's going to be an homage to the classic erotic thrillers of the 80s, like Body Heat, Body Double, 9 1/2 Weeks, American Gigolo, on and on, but it soon becomes something much more unpredictable and surreal, giving us a story of unreliable narrators and skewed perceptions, of violent tendencies, and the things we do when we're wild in love. As the title indicates, this is a story about love, lies, and a whole bunch of bleeding, so it features a lot of guns and sex and murder.

It’s basically a story about life in America.

Set in late 1989, in some dusty-ass middle of nowhere town, somewhere in the dusty-ass southern end of the state of New Mexico, a place where everything looks like it’s baking beneath an oppressive desert dry heat, we first meet Louise "Lou" Langston (Kristen Stewart) with her hand as far down a disgustingly clogged gym bathroom toilet as you can get. This is Lou‘s whole life… cleaning up messes. It’s all she really does in this movie. But at the start of the film, Lou is living a solitary life. She has cut herself off from her family as much as she can, and is just trying to live quietly, all while doing her best to quit smoking. It's not taking, and it's clear that this is because Lou is obviously haunted by something, and this solitary life is her doing penance for something. But despite her monk-like life as a gym employee, she still has a ton of stressful shit from her past going on her head.

So she keeps smoking, despite her declarations that she has quit.

Her father, Lou Langston Sr. (Ed Harris, looking like the biggest scumbag on the planet, the poster child for small town America crime) is basically the town’s crime lord. Wealthy and cruel, and clearly as mean as a snake, he is the owner of multiple businesses, including a local gun range, as well as the local cops, and makes most of his money running guns across the Mexican border. The Lord of the town, able to do whatever he wants, for years he has been disposing of anyone who threatens his power in a deep, jagged ravine out in the desert.

The pile of bodies that are moldering down there in that dark crack in the Earth possibly includes his own wife, Lou’s mother.

Lou wants nothing more than to be anywhere else, doing anything else, but she sticks around because her sister Beth (Jena Malone) is the sadly devoted wife of a mulleted little piece of shit weasel, with a shitstain of a mustache, named JJ (Dave Franco). He beats her regularly, and occasionally puts her in a hospital.

Lou hates him so much, she regularly considers murdering him.

That’s when Jackie (Katy O’Brian) blows into town. A beefed-up bodybuilder with dreams of competition stardom, and a place amongst celebrity trainers in L.A., she has run away from her small Oklahoma hometown with basically nothing but the clothes on her back. Looking to make a little money to fund her trip the rest of the way to Vegas, where a big competition waits, she fucks JJ in a parking lot in order to get a job waitressing at the bar out at the gun range. Then, with nothing else to do, she decides to checks out the local gym, so that she can get a workout in.

A fateful decision…

Jackie and Lou are immediately drawn to one another.

Soon enough, Jackie has moved in with Lou, and together they are enjoying egg white omelets, muscle milk, and some steroids injections, all while having the kind of sweaty, grasping hand, up-against-the-wall, painted-by-the-light-and-shadows-coming-in-through-the-slats-of-the-levolor-blinds sex that is often found in your typical 80’s erotic thrillers.

But their happy little home can’t stay that way forever, especially once Lou finds out that Jackie slept with JJ, but most especially because this story takes place in small town America, which is a world of near-constant violence, or at the very least the threat of it. Especially against women.

Soon enough, that violence strikes too close to home.

This leads to a shockingly bloody act, an act that sets off a cascade of violence, creating a deluge of blood, pushing the characters into tighter and tighter spaces, increasing the pressure, where the only way out may be… yep, more violence.

That everyone in this story has such a deep well of violence within them is shocking at first, but less so once you realize that everyone’s past is also somewhat shrouded in mystery. We hear things about their respective histories throughout the film, but it’s either a vague recounting from the specific character, often heavy with unsaid implications, or it’s through second hand information, or glimpsed through their actions. What this does is illustrate that everyone here is an unreliable liar, so who knows who these people really were before the story started, or where they’re really from, and most importantly, what they’ve done in their pasts.

At first, you think that Lou has split from her father because of whatever he did to her mother, but later, it becomes clear that her mother disappeared over a decade ago, and that whatever happened between her and her father seemed to have been more recent, or at least, is not directly related to that moment. We catch rumors of how Lou used to “be more like her dad“ and maybe even that she was worse, and we can kind of see the potential truth in this whenever shit hits the fan in this film, which it does… often, and Lou has to deal with it. Basically, it's obvious that there’s a steel in Lou. She’s used to holding a gun.

Additionally, at the start of the film, you naturally assume that the reason why Jackie ran away from her small Oklahoman hometown was due to the kind of oppressive home life one would expect a bodybuilding-obsessed bisexual young woman to have grown up under in Right-wing Christian Middle America. But as the film goes on, and you see Jackie lose it, often literally (in her mind) hulking out, and growing frighteningly huge and strong whenever she loses her temper, whether it’s because she’s angry, or when she thinks that she’s protecting Lou, you start to wonder… Did Jackie run away from home because of a bigoted, narrow-minded home life, or because she’s mentally unbalanced and manipulative with a rage problem? The possibility that this is the more likely scenario becomes most especially clear when, at one point, as everything is just awash in blood, Jackie is despondent and calls home, only to have her mom call her a “monster” and to tell her to never to call again. The way her mother says it, yes, it could be construed to have been said because her mother is a sadly all too typical bigoted piece of shit in Christian Right Middle America. And yet... from the way her mother says it, it did make me wonder, if her mother considers Jackie to be a monster because, at some point in the past, Jackie snapped and did something terrible, something akin to the kind of bloody shit we've already seen her do here in this dusty-ass New Mexico small town?

I feel like it could go either way.

A couple of murders later, with the FBI getting a little too close, Jackie’s hold on reality becomes more and more tenuous, and it all leads to one last big showdown between father, daughter, and daughter’s massive she-hulk of a lesbian lover. After which, the pair run off together through the clouds, clad in sequins and starlight, with nothing but the open road, their shared love, and at least one more murder lying before them.

Love Lies Bleeding is an erotic thriller on steroids, growing bolder, but stranger and more unhinged with each twist that is injected into its narrative. This is a story about fucked-up people, most of whom seem to be motivated by love, but that love is coming from such a toxic and twisted place, mangled by their environments and their own ugly histories. Like I said, it’s all fucked up, but that's why they all do what they do… they’re fucked up people.

Stewart and O’Brian are fantastic together. Stewart is always great, of course, and she really hits the line between Lou’s confidence and vulnerability, but O’Brain is the star here. She is magnetic, nothing but nerves and naïveté, a charming flirt, but also a powder keg that is ready to blow in a moment. It’s a performance that only gets more intense as the film progressives.

It’s an amazing watch.

The film is gorgeous too. Every bit of it incredible looking.

Yes, it gets a little too big for its britches at the end. Yes, it’s a little overly ambitious. Yes, the hallucinations, while interesting, somewhat undermine the foundations of this otherwise pretty straightforward crime story at times. And yes, it’s also fair to say that noble failures are still failures, but still… at least they’re interesting to watch. I don't know if I can say that all of Love Lies Bleeding worked, but I definitely loved it. I've found myself thinking about it, and some of its imagery, since watching.

Big thumbs up. Highly recommended.