I desperately tried to get tickets to “Love Lies Bleeding” in Berlin, but whatever bots people programmed to game the ticket site were scooping them up within 45 seconds. I would have loved to see a movie like this with an excited crowd (instead of a near-empty theater) because this film feeds off the energy of the gleeful and the disgusted in equal measure. It’s the kind of film where watching people’s reactions is just as, if not more, entertaining than watching the movie itself.
There isn’t anything that off-putting about “Love Lies Bleeding,” at least not if you know what kind of film you’re getting into. Writer-director Rose Glass citing John Waters as an influence isn’t so much a direct point of reference as it is a way for her to signal her desire to be transgressive. And at a point in mainstream film when sex is back to being taboo, over-the-top violence feels weightless, and protagonists have to be either pure and good or, at the very least, redeemable, Glass succeeds in creating something grimy and bleak. She doesn’t pull any punches, with every creative choice from her and her performers taking a huge swing and often connecting provocatively.
The recent film I thought about most, undoubtedly because of Kristen Stewart’s presence, was David Cronenberg's “Crimes of the Future.” Thematically, the films aren’t that similar, but you can connect each’s obsession with the human body and molding it for performance art. The bodybuilding sequences are intimate and intense. They focus on close-ups of bulging muscles drenched in sweat. Jackie is sculpting her body to put it on display as if it were a work of art, and the beauty of Jackie’s art connects with Lou. We don’t get a ton of scenes of Lou and Jackie getting to know one another on a deeper level through conversation because we don’t have to. Jackie expresses herself through the way she shapes her body and Lou sees that. The sex scenes between the two are confirmations that they see each other in ways no one else can.
With big swings come big whiffs, though the highs are high enough to overcome them. The ending, in which Lou’s father is about to kill her for exposing his crimes to the feds, and a concerned Jackie grows into a 50-foot woman through the power of roid rage to save the day, doesn’t work on several levels. For one, this bizarre bit of surrealism comes out of nowhere, and while it’s likely happening in the head of one or both of Lou and Jackie, it feels out of place in a film that, to that point, had been more grounded. But more importantly, it just feels very cheap, like Glass wasn’t sure how to finish the film, so she just went with an idea that half made sense and hoped people would be invested enough that it would at least make emotional sense. This is not a problem confined to the final moments, as Glass focuses the film’s first half far more on creating mood and fleshing out the characters. The shift into plot-driven nonsense in the second half leads to some exciting moments but also more disjointed storytelling.
Still, “Love Lies Bleeding” works because it is not one in which what happens matters. It’s all about atmosphere, about feeling. It’s a sexy, grotesque, energized thriller that works best as pure entertainment. It’s not high concept. It’s not bogged down in trying to make surface-level statements on societal issues. It is exactly the kind of genre filmmaking we need more of at this moment in time.
