LOVE LIES BLEEDING

As stylish, suspenseful and exciting as Love Lies Bleeding builds towards the central crime, as laboriously and disappointing the picture’s second half unspools, despite excellent performances.

Good artists borrow, great artists steal, the saying goes. Love Lies Bleeding thus is off to a good start because both in visual style and dramatic impetus the movie nicks plenty from the Coens’ debut Blood Simple. It doesn’t stick the ending though.

The film wastes no time in setting the pieces on the board: a lesbian romance between a gym assistant and an aspiring bodybuilder, a fractured relationship with a domineering father, an in-law with a temper that is bound to get him into trouble. As the story strands interact, a fascinating, violent love story unfurls that will effortlessly grip you.

Kudos therefore must go to writer-director Rose Glass, who summons a brooding atmosphere with memorable images and a suitably kinetic energy. She gets great assistance from an uniformly excellent cast, with palpable chemistry between leading duo Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian, and Clint Mansell’s ominously percolating soundtrack.

Yet while Love Lies Bleeding excels in ramping up the tension in its first half, once the picture’s defining murder most foul occurs, the balloon starts to inflate, slowly at first, but ever faster as the denouement approaches and it becomes clear that an authoritative central thematic through-line is the one ingredient that the film is sorely lacking.

Love Lies Bleeding remains a better than average entry in the long line of violent, edgy ‘crime and punishment’ flicks but it’s hardly the gamechanger some have made it out to be.

release: 2024

director: Rose Glass

starring: Kristen Stewart, Katy O'Brian, Ed Harris, Dave Franco