Flasz On Film

When Rose Glass debuted with Saint Maud, a lot has been made of the filmmaker’s connection to Martin Scorsese and that her genre-bent psychological study of a young woman’s slow process of detaching completely from observable reality was a tacit ode to Taxi Driver. Now, five years on, Glass is back with Love Lies Bleeding, a movie that is perhaps positioned not so much to undermine that infatuation with Scorsese but build upon it as a foundation and even to recontextualize some of her own thematic interests by way of allowing us to see which wells she chooses to revisit. And where she still has a lot of room to develop.  

There is absolutely no debate that Glass as a filmmaker is predominantly interested in generating a mood and utilizing the camera to get into her characters’ headspace. This is a good chunk of the reason why Saint Maud functions as an ode to Scorsese and Schrader and Love Lies Bleeding doesn’t stray from this path for the most part. This movie is defined by its atmosphere, which some have come to identify as an ode to the 1980s. Which is true, but I think there’s a bit more to it than that.  

On its surface, Love Lies Bleeding positions itself as a slick neo-noir a crafty critic could peg as “Coen-esque.” Blood Simple with bodybuilders. Again, not wrong because Rose Glass makes a considerable effort to leverage the setting of her film, which takes place in the middle-of-nowhere America, roughly somewhere in the 1980s; though, I can’t be too certain of that. And it doesn’t matter that much either. What does matter, however, is that the setting contributes to the movie’s mood, which is supposed to evoke the icky sleaze of Paul Schrader, the rogue spirit of an 80s De Palma stint and an idiosyncratic approach to the neon-washed setting plucked straight out of the aforementioned Blood Simple. With a twist.  

And that’s because Glass is in my opinion flying much closer to Darren Aronofsky than to any and all of these other filmmakers with the way she frames her film, how she invades the viewer’s comfort zone and how she breaches the boundaries between what we are supposed to decode as reality and what is supposed to function as a manufactured figment of imagination. What she is engineering here is a weirdo superhero movie set in a universe not too dissimilar from the one found in Hardcore and populated with characters you wouldn’t object to finding in The Wrestler or Black Swan… all hanged upon a rather flimsy-looking narrative skeleton owing a few bucks to the Coen Brothers, Ridley Scott, and even Cormac McCarthy. Think No Country for Old Men meeting The Counsellor, having a beer with Black Swan and watching Taxi Driver for the umpteenth time and you’ve got yourself a recipe for Love Lies Bleeding, or at least a vague thematic outline of it.  

That’s because defining the thematic topography of the movie you’re about to make is only a fraction of its ultimate potential, especially when the movie you’re trying to make is supposed to function in the realm of noir. What you need is a set of archetypes that are magnetic enough to carry you into the maw of despair you’ve so carefully put together out of your own passionate proclivities towards that neon-lit aesthetic and a conglomeration of references to the alluringly dark pieces of genre cinema from the 70s and 80s. Enter Lou (Kristen Stewart), a social recluse working at a dimly lit gym profoundly saturated with sweat and testosterone, and Jackie (Katy O’Brian), a female bodybuilder who comes through the town and somehow imprints on Lou. The two begin a steamy relationship and immediately find themselves boxed in by the tiny small-town criminal underworld on the fringes of which Lou has thus far existed, as her father (Ed Harris) is a local crime lord, her sister (Jena Malone) is a victim of domestic violence at the hands of her husband (Dave Franco)… and it all ever so slowly comes to a boil while Jackie either loses contact with reality or develops superhuman abilities. Or both.  

Admittedly, the narrative conceit underpinning Love Lies Bleeding is weird and in places verges on ridiculous so much that it made me think back to Beau Is Afraid and some of the places that movie went to towards the end. But that’s neither here nor there. A movie is allowed to go places and it doesn’t necessarily have to form a watertight narrative to succeed in its primary mission, which I believe is to tell a story rooted in rudimentary character work. Which is both where the movie comes to its own and where Rose Glass’ directorial control leaves something to be desired.  

As far as I can tell, Love Lies Bleeding thrives on its central relationship between Lou and Jackie, which serves as a concrete grounding piece to which all other genre constructs are tethered. Glass manages to successfully craft a safe space for these two women to cohabit where she allows one of them (O’Brian) to veer into the realm of avantgarde superhero mythmaking and the other to engage in a Schrader-esque revenge fantasy. Now, I am not exactly certain as to how deep I’d be allowed to explore the character underpinnings of this movie without excessively reading into the blank spaces between the lines of dialogue, but I remain convinced that the movie – for all its narrative contrivances and convenient resolutions – has quite a lot to say and that it is destined to reveal its true colours only upon multiple revisits. Something tells me it’s a grower.  

There is something fundamentally alluring about the way this story bobs and weaves between its narrative touchpoints and how it momentarily brushes shoulders with different flavours of abuse, obsession and even one’s relationship with reality. Now, these are all things Glass is intimately familiar with as similar thematic notes can be detected in Saint Maud. But here, she admittedly bits a bit more. Perhaps a bit more than she can chew. And this may be partly because on top of jousting with all those heady concepts and moody ideas attempting to hide just beneath the epidermis of the movie’s aesthetic, the filmmaker must also somehow restrain and direct a performer like Kristen Stewart.  

Now, I’ve always been fond of Stewart even though she can occasionally come across as a female equivalent of Keanu Reeves, an actor dominated by her own idiosyncrasies and frequently retreating into the comfort zone of facial tics, shrugs and oblique delivery. However, I’ve always seen her as a piece of complex acting machinery that requires skill and expertise on behalf of the filmmaker to leverage her true potential, lean into her strengths and subdue some of her comfort zone tendencies. She’s great with Larraín in Spencer. She’s always been fantastic when directed by Assayas. But I think Glass either allowed her to “do her thing” a bit too much or maybe didn’t quite manage to focus her energy.  

Thankfully, Katy O’Brian’s natural and somewhat intimidating presence makes sure the Stewart loose cannon doesn’t roll around the deck and sow destruction to the movie as a whole. She’s a grounding influence. A wall for Stewart to bounce off of. An angel of retribution on a downward spiral towards insanity… or an arthouse Incredible Hulk hybridized with Aronofsky’s Black Swan. As I said. Weird.  

Add to that Glass’ own particular bent towards on-screen violence, suggestive flashes of body horror, moody pacing and Ed Harris’ hair and Love Lies Bleeding becomes an honestly idiosyncratic and singular piece of genre filmmaking that leverages its creator’s proclivities and evolves to become an oddball. Too peculiar for the mainstream. Too normal for the arthouse, it is an elevated superhero piece that could easily fit into a post-Taxi Driver niche and maybe even hold a reading suggesting that a lot of what we see on the screen takes place only in someone’s head. Maybe Lou invents Jackie. Maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe we see what Lou wants to see and it’s not supposed to make logical sense. This, for all intents and purposes, is for the future me to figure out when I come back to this film in twelve months’ time.  

For now, I am happy to draw a line under this movie and look forward to what else Rose Glass has in store for me. It is clear that it took her at least two movies to get those motifs of abuse, identity, self-perception and retreat from the horror of reality into inner phantasmagoria while spiraling towards self-destruction out of her system. I believe that in many ways Love Lies Bleeding functions as a spiritual continuation of thematic conversations Glass wanted to have with the viewer at the time she made Saint Maud and that perhaps the two movies should be viewed together. But one of these films is definitely tighter than the other and therefore more potent. And it’s not Love Lies Bleeding, which is distinctly more audacious in places, but it equally places greater demands on the viewer to achieve what Saint Maud accomplished without breaking a sweat. And what Prano Bailey-Bond’s Censor excelled at.