Glasgow Film Festival: Love Lies Bleeding

Rose Glass’s second feature is a sometimes fun, more often scattershot splodge of neon that never quite adds up to the sum of its parts.

Having had breakout success with 2019’s Saint Maude, Rose Glass shifts from the intense character study of guilt and faith to something far broader and propulsive. So propulsive in fact that a lot of key ingredients, namely character and plot, have a habit of skidding wildly out of control.

We’re in dead-end ’80s small-town America. Lou (Kirsten Stewart), the terse gym manager who spends her time unclogging toilets, smoking tabs and barely concealing her rage towards her sister Beth’s (Jena Malone) cruel philandering husband JJ (Dave Franco). One day Jackie (Katy O’Brian) strolls into the gym, a bodybuilder hitchhiking her way towards Vegas. They strike up a quick and vaguely idyllic relationship that begins to be threatened as Lou’s criminal father (Ed Harris) and steroids enter the fray.

It does well to initially evoke its era. The film’s primary tones are garish neon and sweat on skin, like a grimy San Junipero, and the set design and cinematography do well to create sense of a place where macho sleaze permeates every nook and cranny of the town. The problem is the characters that inhabit it feel too archetypal, too lacking in the eccentricities and unpredictabilities that would make them believable. It makes the little flourishes of oddness, like Lou Senior’s obsession with bugs and JJ’s bizarre haircut feel like afterthoughts, rather than elements that are part of the character from the ground up.

It’s no fault of the actors; everyone gives their all, but the material simply doesn’t give them enough, alternating between them having nothing to do and the wonky plotting that demands the characters transform scene to scene depending on what the plot needs them to be now. Jena Malone in particular is feeding off absolute scraps, Beth a paper-thin cliché of meek subservience.

This issue of plotting can’t be escaped either. The film rockets along, that can’t be argued, and it is decent enough fun as it happens. But, boy does it have some shonky plotting. There’s whole characters whose existence makes absolutely no sense but are there purely to fulfil the odd bit of narrative housekeeping, with plot points like the bodybuilding contest that gives Jackie her whole motivation for the film falling in and out of having any weight, one minute vital, the next meaningless.

Glass remains capable of constructing striking images, particularly the queasy discomfort she brings to the repeated shots of a sunken chasm that thread through the film, and some of the film’s bodily hyper-fixations have a real grisly power; but often they feel like little more than striking images, the narrative twisting and mulching its momentum to make them possible. I’m far from averse to films not making sense, but there has to at least be an internal logic at play, and Love Lies Bleeding never feels fully secure in the world it has built or the characters that inhabit it.

Glass is clearly a talented film-maker and it is enjoyable to see her take risks; but unfortunately this second feature lands as a some times fun, but ultimately unsatisfying misstep.

-Joe Creely-

The Glasgow Film Festival runs from 28 February – 10 March 2024. Love Lies Bleeding is released in UK Cinemas on 3 May 2024.