Love Lies Bleeding (2023 | USA | 104 minutes | Rose Glass)

Between this and last year’s Magazine Dreams, someone in the Sundance programming department sure has a thing for bodybuilder body horror.

With an eighties lady mullet and unvarnished appearance, Kristen Stewart almost holds the chaotic center of a wild story of sexual obsession and long-lingering grudges. She plays Lou, a middle-of-nowhere New Mexico gym manager who starts the film up to her elbows in a shit-clogged toilet. It’s the least offensive imposition she’ll endure as the film escalates in terms of doling out increasingly outlandish grime and borderline comedic gore.

Over a steroid-shooting seduction, she instantly falls hard for Jackie, a wayward bodybuilder (Katy O’Brian) who’s left her unaccepting hometown in favor of chasing her fitness dreams to Las Vegas. She’s a captivating if incongruous presence on screen with an intensity that suggests an asymmetry in the passionate relationship that finds her in Lou’s bed. (Her introduction in the film finds her completing a transactional sex act in the back of a Camaro before sleeping under an underpass). Aside from the supplements and sex, she also gets a place to crash, work out, and with someone to feed her sensuously filmed a relentless supply of high protein meals as she puts the finishing touches on her physique. Her off-kilter delivery is something from the start, and that’s even before the ‘roids start to rage through her vein-popping body.

The rest of the family’s drama is fleshed out with sinister haircuts and performances from Ed Harris as a slithery small-town crimelord and Dave Franco as a piece-of-shit abusive brother-in-law who gets Jackie a job at Harris’s gun range. One’s buried years of secrets at the bottom of an ominous canyon; the other commits his heinous acts in nearly plain sight. Both gets what’s coming to them, and more through a series of satisfying yet explosions of violence.

It’s a movie that starts unhinged, escalates grotesquely beyond deranged, and then leaves the pull of gravity behind to something else entirely. Director Rose Glass goes berserko mode in putting a feminist spin on pulp references with comedic gore and double crosses. For my taste it squealed off the rails with the furious gusto by which it chased every possible absurdity beyond its logical convention. As an exercise in twisting the conventions of genre, there’s a level of adrenaline that holds eyeballs until it explodes. Even though I can’t stay that it entirely came together to be more than the sum of its provocative parts, I acknowledge that my skepticism and exhaustion were in the minority as it rocketed to its conclusion for an uproarious midnight crowd.

Love Lies Bleeding played as official selection of the Midnight program; A24 will release it later this year.
Image courtesy Sundance Institute.