Review: In ‘Love Lies Bleeding,’ dangerous lusts and noirish calculations are alive and well

Kristen Stewart, playing a gym manager named Lou, starts Rose Glass’ marvelously seedy “Love Lies Bleeding” elbow-deep in a clogged toilet while a blond (Anna Baryshnikov) begs her desperately for a date. Straightaway, you know two things: Lou is resigned to cleaning up other people’s messes, and this erotic thriller has a sadistic way of getting its kicks.

The year is 1989, the cultural moment when “American Gladiators” brought muscle-bound women with names like Zap and Lace into people’s homes. Right on cue, a bodybuilding drifter named Jackie (Katy O’Brian) barges into Lou’s life. Biceps like Jackie’s come from physical discipline — but as for Jackie’s mental and emotional health, she’s an unpredictable mess. During her first 24 hours trying to find a foothold in Albuquerque’s moody fringes, Jackie sleeps with JJ (Dave Franco), Lou’s repellent brother-in-law, for a job, and then Lou herself for reasons the film leaves deliberately vague. A free bedroom? A gym membership? Maybe even love?

It’s tempting to call it love, to see Lou and Jackie as survivors clinging to each other in a brutal world where JJ knocks around Lou’s sister, Beth (Jena Malone), and Lou’s father, Lou Sr. (Ed Harris) — chew on that naming for a second — fires a pistol at Jackie’s head just to get her attention. We’ve been trained to think of characters like Lou and Jackie as victims. Particularly queer women, particularly in a time and town like this.

But that’s not what interests Glass and Weronika Tofilska, the co-writers of this horny, thorny script. To them, Lou and Jackie’s sexual orientation is less compelling than the fact that both use sex to get something they want. Spinning the wreckage these women cause into some kind of representational triumph is like arguing Warren Beatty’s bank-robbing Clyde Barrow is a hero for men with erectile dysfunction. Though the pair whisper the word “love” in bed and even seem to think they mean it, this is not a movie about two people healing each other. It’s about two broken souls mashing their jagged edges together, hurting each other and those around them. And it’s fun to watch the blood splatter.

Kristen Stewart, left, and Katy O’Brian in the movie “Love Lies Bleeding.”

(Anna Kooris / A24)

Stewart and O’Brian’s sex scenes are designed to stir up conversation. Lou licks what looks like a chocolate protein drink off Jackie’s pecs; Lou flicks a lighter under her girlfriend’s feet as she does pull-ups, and, for a reward, sucks Jackie’s toes. (As a salute to longtime L.A. Times film critic Justin Chang, I am obliged to call that mo-toe-vation.) Lou pokes and prods and grabs at her lover as though she’s fascinated — hypnotized, even — by a woman with popping bicep veins. So are we. O’Brian, a real-life bodybuilder and Hapkido black belt and a former cop, packs more onscreen wow factor than any fantastical CG super suit. Their intimate moments are stretched out in slow motion, but the film always abruptly cuts away mid-tryst. The couple is never allowed to relax. Tension builds.

Stewart, phenomenal as ever, has two great line readings under two syllables: “Yup” and “Huzzah.” Here, montages shoulder as much plot as the dialogue. Partly, this is because O’Brian’s Jackie never opens up about her past beyond a hasty mention that she was once fat and bullied. When Jackie lashes out intensely, it’s hard to track why. Is it trauma or steroids? Her inner life goes more or less ignored by the other characters, who are caught up in their own dramas. Instead, we can only watch in increasing horror at how she moves through the film silently, like the hush before a bomb hits the ground.

The closest the film comes to articulating Jackie’s muffled thoughts is the motivational posters at the gym: “Destiny is a decision.” “Pain is weakness leaving the body.” (To that, I’ll just say Arnold Schwarzenegger isn’t most people’s top pick for a couple’s therapist.) Occasionally, her psyche is made too literal. In one scene, when Jackie is feeling trapped, the editing splices in an insert of a boiling coffee percolator and an old news clip of the Berlin Wall.

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Otherwise, “Love Lies Bleeding” has superb technical style. We can hear the muscles rippling under Jackie’s skin, and the ominous difference between quiet and airless. Cinematographer Ben Fordesman shoots the movie like a prestige noir. At night, the desert blacks are as dense and mysterious as the La Brea Tar Pits.

But Glass herds the tone toward comedy, teasing us to admit that Lou and Jackie’s predicament is funny. Can we laugh when Lou and Jackie tumble into bed and the soundtrack cues up a highbrow version of bom-chicka porno music? Can we laugh at Baryshnikov’s infatuated ninny with her bottom row of rotting orange teeth? Or when Lou Sr. stress-eats a wriggling bug? Or, most daringly, when Malone’s Beth, disfigured and swollen from her latest spousal beating, turns to her sister and hisses, “You don’t know anything about love!”

Then again, “Love Lies Bleeding” isn’t really about love. It might not be about anything besides Glass’ own urge to poke and prod audiences to remember the kinky delight of movies that leave us dangling. The torment is delicious.