Editor’s Note: Vanyaland Film Editor Nick Johnston is out in Park City, Utah, covering the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. Scan through our full coverage of Sundance reviews from this year’s festival as they go live, and check out our full archives of past editions.
Hunter S. Thompson once said, “When the going gets weird, the weird go pro,” and the goings most certainly started to go weird for Rose Glass back in 2019. Saint Maud was an unexpected hit on the festival circuit, starring a little-known actor in a genuinely star-making role (if only someone had told Morfaddyn Clark to stay away from the Amazon offices, as nice as that Rings of Power check must have been to cash), and announced the debut of a major new talent in the horror sphere. The pandemic unduly fucked over that film’s release, with A24 playing a shell game with its calendar slot before giving up and dropping the motherfucker on Epix or some other dogshit streaming platform, but people saw it and responded, even if they didn’t wind up shelling out the dollars they’d later spend on Talk to Me. The question remained, though: Where does she go from here? Does she do what everyone expects and makes another English horror drama? Does she raid the A24 coffers and drop some Beau is Afraid bullshit? Or does she do something so style-expanding and profoundly competent that it’ll relegate Saint Maud to that “debut film” status reserved for flicks like The Evil Dead or Dark Star or Shivers (I know that’s Cronenberg’s third, but it was the first one that anybody saw), whose masters went on to do way better for themselves once given access to some real cash? I won’t leave you in suspense: she clearly chose the third option. Rose Glass went pro with Love Lies Bleeding.
It’s 1989 in a mid-sized town in New Mexico, and Lou (Kristen Stewart) is stuck. She spends her days working the counter at a local gym, fending off hook-ups with a lamprey-like hanger-on with simile-appropriate awful teeth, and tending to her sister (Jena Malone) after her dipshit husband JJ (Dave Franco) abuses her for some slight. Her sister won’t leave her man, so she can’t leave town. Meanwhile, Jackie (Katy O’Brian) has just arrived in town and is sleeping under a bridge. After hooking up with a local, she gets a job waitressing at a gun range’s on-site diner, working for an old coot named Lou Sr. (Ed Harris), who collects exotic bugs and could shoot the legs off of a ladybug from a mile out. But Jackie’s got herself a dream: She wants to be a bodybuilder, being, at least at first, natty as fuck — no ‘roids in this body, no way — and eventually makes her way to Lou’s gym. The two lock eyes from across the room, and there’s no turning back. See, Lou doesn’t know that the guy Jackie fucked to get her job was her sister’s husband, and Jackie doesn’t know that her boss at the gun range is called Lou Sr. for a reason: he’s her Lou’s dad. Even worse, she doesn’t know that the elder Lou is actually a pretty high-powered criminal, dealing arms to the cartels, police in his pocket — all she sees is a hot young woman offering her a place to stay, free ‘roids, and an all-too-rare chance to have a genuinely caring relationship.
They have shared dreams, after all. Lou wants an escape from the town, from her family, from her past, and Jackie wants to win a competition in Vegas that will cement her as one of the names in female bodybuilding, paving a way much closer to Easy Street than the one she’s been on. But, of course, those secrets begin finding their way out into the open: an extremely awkward dinner that the two of them share with her sister and brother-in-law leads to two things: Lou finds out what Jackie did to get her job and wonders if she’s getting exploited by her/acts rash and frustrated on the drive home, and JJ’s abuse crosses over into a whole new dimension of evil. When the pair visit Lou’s sister in the hospital, where she’s swollen almost beyond recognition, Lou and her father meet for the first time in years and years. She’s threatened to kill JJ in the past, and Lou Sr. always tells her that they’ll keep the requisite justice in the family rather than calling the law, which hasn’t yielded any positive results in the past. But Jackie’s roided up, practically feeling the muscles bursting from her traps and biceps, and decides to take matters into her own hands. What follows will put the two of them in an absurd amount of danger, as Lou hatches a plot to get what she wants while also allowing for the both of them to escape cleanly, and an unhinged Jackie attempts to make her way to Vegas, regardless of what anyone might think, slowly morphing into a hulking creature of pure reactive instinct.
Well, that’s one hell of a plot, right? It’d all be for naught if not for the ensemble, which is so precisely well-assembled that it will be frustrating when they’re not all nominated for group awards next year. Glass could not have cast this film better, and each player turns in work worthy of superlatives: Malone is sympathetic yet earns Lou’s (and our) frustration; Franco is slimy in ways that defy belief yet charismatic enough for us to understand why this dude has escaped punishment and seemingly charms his way out of even extra-judicial consequences, and Harris is, well, Ed Harris, being thunderously odd, evil and weirdly worthy of empathy, even with his terrifying hairstyle and obsession with the insects that line his trailer’s walls on the range. But, of course, it’s O’Brian and Stewart who will take home all of the accolades, and deservedly so. Hollywood has taken to bodybuilding and roid rage as a subject for a number of inside-baseball reasons over the last few years, and even if you’ll never get to see Jonathan Majors’ great-if-terrifying-in-retrospect turn in Magazine Dreams, O’Brian picks up where he left off. She shows us what it looks like to be fully aware and totally out of control, living in a horror movie comprised of the consequences of her actions. Her physical transformation is almost as impressive as her mental one, sinking into the depths of this character’s flaws without ever losing sight of why someone might fall head-over-heels for them in the first place.
Yet all of this would be for naught if she didn’t have someone to fall in love with in the first place performing at and often above her caliber. Kristen Stewart is an actor that I’ve had an odd relationship with — I like a number of her post-Hollywood roles, but no one could ever characterize me as a Stan. She’s often left wanting by writers and directors looking for something different than what she brings to a role, and though the mismatch can be interesting (Spencer, for one), it’s often disharmonious, at least for me. Yet Love Lies Bleeding gives her the strongest characterization since Personal Shopper, another genre-tinged film that Stewart brought her A-Game to, is practically built from the ground up to complement all of her strengths without either party having to sacrifice. As Lou, she’s able to harness the components that make her such an ideal lead for a number of projects and present them to us in a way that buffets the film’s setting, style, and feel. She’s awkward, slightly traumatized, fiercely loyal, petty as hell, passionate, and nervous: In short, she’s the ideal protagonist for a neo-noir, embodying the same kind of sweaty energy that’s alluring and, once combined with the dark cloud that hangs around her, becomes a type of magnet for would-be saviors who don’t understand that she can save herself, and, more importantly, the trap they’ll get stuck in should they try to.
It should go without saying that Glass takes a good deal of inspiration from another Sundance hit, the Coens’ debut Blood Simple, in that it effortlessly blends a disparate set of styles inside of a neo-noir framework under the sun-soaked skies of the Southwest. Yet it differs where it counts in its perception of neo-noir, the extremity with which Glass portrays these events, and the film’s overall karmic outlook. Rather than defaulting to the typical premise that you’d find in a tale like this (one of the leads meets a femme fatale and gets in trouble, eliding the other’s perspective), the two protagonists share their time in the spotlight, and the film’s broad enough to accommodate them both, making the old storytelling styles feel novel when placed so closely together. It’s also covered in heaps of style, most of it period-appropriate: The soundtrack is covered with contemporaneous ‘80s hits, and the characters are dressed appropriately, looking less like Hollywood stars than the most attractive residents of a small Southwestern town. It’s lived-in and has the raw stench that a freshly dug shallow grave has: There’s evil here, just lurking under two or three inches of soil, waiting to manifest in the form of whatever fresh kind of nightmare someone’s cooked up for themselves.
Nightmarish (or perhaps dreamlike) is a good way of expressing the exaggerated nature of the events as depicted here. Glass is unafraid of immersing us wholly in exaggerated metaphor in lieu of the expected version of events (the climax of this film is genuinely shocking in how it disperses with reality, regarding it as a mere inconvenience), and her perspective on the events within requires a maximalist approach. We don’t see Jackie’s muscles grow steadily over time; we watch as she quite literally hulks out, sans the green skin, with varicose veins bursting to the top of her stretching skin in a drugged-out haze. There aren’t just flashbacks; there are red-soaked glimpses into the evils that Lou and her father have committed in the name of father-daughter bonding that leap out from the edit as starkly-lit jump scares. To constrain these characters with the comparatively-certain morality of the Coens, pre-No Country for Old Men, would do them a disservice: They are consummately compromised souls who aren’t wholly defined by their actions. And, even better, the nature of their romance feels earned and isn’t just a flashy aesthetic accessory for one to help ease away the pain of a midlife crisis (you better bet Focus high-fived each other when they were able to slate Drive-Away Dolls before this, even with a strike delay): It’s honest passion, captured in a genuinely cinematic way.
So, if directors had baseball cards, anybody who held on to her rookie card after Saint Maud should get ready to rake in some dough: Love Lies Bleeding is Glass calling her shot in the upper decks and blowing the lights out Redford-style on its way to the parking lots. A perfect pairing for Sundance, huh?