'Love Lies Bleeding' review: erotic film noir is alive and well

Kristen Stewart, playing a gym manager named Lou, begins Rose Glass's wonderfully sleazy “Love Lies Bleeding” elbow-deep in a clogged toilet while a blonde (Anna Baryshnikov) desperately begs her for a date. Right away, you know two things: Lou is resigned to cleaning up other people's messes, and this erotic thriller has a sadistic way of having fun.

The year is 1989, the cultural moment when “American Gladiators” brought muscular women with names like Zap and Lace into people's homes. Right on cue, a deadbeat bodybuilder named Jackie (Katy O'Brian) bursts into Lou's life. Biceps like Jackie's come from physical discipline, but when it comes to Jackie's mental and emotional health, he's an unpredictable mess. During her first 24 hours trying to find a foothold on the temperamental fringes of Albuquerque, Jackie sleeps with JJ (Dave Franco), Lou's obnoxious brother-in-law, to get a job, and then with Lou herself for reasons she finds film deliberately leaves it vague. A spare bedroom? A gym membership? Maybe even love?

It's tempting to call it love, to see Lou and Jackie as survivors clinging to each other in a brutal world where JJ beats Lou's sister Beth (Jena Malone) and Lou's father Lou Sr. (Ed Harris ). naming for a second, he fires a gun at Jackie's head just to get her attention. We've been trained to think of characters like Lou and Jackie as victims. Especially queer women, especially in a time and city like this.

But that's not what interests Glass and Weronika Tofilska, the co-writers of this horny and thorny script. To them, Lou and Jackie's sexual orientation is less compelling than the fact that they both use sex to get something they want. Turning the debris these women cause into some kind of representational triumph is like arguing that Clyde Barrow, the bank robber played by Warren Beatty, is a hero for men with erectile dysfunction. Although the couple whispers the word “love” in bed and even seems to think they mean it, this is not a movie about two people healing each other. It's about two broken souls crushing their jagged edges, hurting each other and those around them. And it's fun to see the blood splatter.

Stewart and O'Brian's sex scenes are designed to spark conversation. Lou licks what looks like a chocolate protein drink off Jackie's pecs; Lou lights a lighter under his girlfriend's feet while she does push-ups and, as a reward, sucks Jackie's fingers. (As a tribute to veteran LA Times film critic Justin Chang, I'm forced to call that mo-toe-vation.) Lou pushes and shoves and grabs at her lover as if she were fascinated, even hypnotized, by a woman with bulging biceps. veins. That's how we are. O'Brian, a real-life bodybuilder and Hapkido black belt and an ex-cop, has more wow factor on screen than any fantastical computer-generated super suit. His intimate moments unfold in slow motion, but the film always breaks abruptly mid-date. The couple is never allowed to relax. The tension increases.

Stewart, phenomenal as always, has two excellent line readings in two syllables: “Yup” and “Huzzah.” Here, the montages have as much plot as dialogue. In part, this is because O'Brian's Jackie never talks about her past beyond a hasty mention that she was once fat and bullied. When Jackie lashes out intensely, it's hard to know why. Is it trauma or steroids? Her inner life is more or less ignored by the other characters, who are trapped in their own dramas. Instead, we can only watch with growing horror as she moves through the film in silence, like the silence before a bomb hits the ground.

The closest the film comes to articulating Jackie's stifled thoughts are the motivational signs in the gym: “Destiny is a decision.” “Pain is weakness that leaves the body.” (To that, I'll just say that Arnold Schwarzenegger is not most people's best choice for a couples therapist.) Occasionally, her psyche becomes too literal. In one scene, when Jackie feels trapped, the editing combines an insert of a boiling coffee pot and an old news clip of the Berlin Wall.

Otherwise, “Love Lies Bleeding” has a magnificent technical style. We can hear the muscles rippling under Jackie's skin and the ominous difference between silence and lack of air. Cinematographer Ben Fordesman shoots the film as if it were a prestige film. At night, the blacks of the desert are as dense and mysterious as the La Brea Tar Pits.

But Glass pushes the tone toward comedy, taunting us into admitting that Lou and Jackie's situation is funny. Can we laugh when Lou and Jackie fall into bed and the soundtrack plays a highbrow version of bom-chicka porn music? Can we laugh at Baryshnikov's lovelorn fool with her bottom row of rotting orange teeth? Or when Lou Sr. stress-eats a squirming insect? Or, more daringly, when Malone’s Beth, disfigured and swollen from her latest marital beating, turns to her sister and hisses: “You don't know anything about love.!”

On the other hand, “Love Lies Bleeding” isn't really about love. It may be nothing more than Glass's own impulse to nudge and prod audiences into remembering the perverted pleasure of movies that leave us hanging. The torment is delicious.