Love Lies Bleeding: Bare-knuckle ride delivers on every word of its title
It’s sex and violence on steroids – perhaps too dark for some but standout performances, especially from Kristen Stewart and a lean mean Ed Harris, make Love Lies Bleeding worth the watch.
Neo-noir romantic thriller Love Lies Bleeding delivers on each word of its title. There is love – erotic, passionate, dangerous, obsessive – there are lies and there is a lot of bleeding.
Set in New Mexico in the late 1980s, there are touches of Thelma and Louise (1991), the Coen brothers and sex-violence genre veterans such as James M. Cain, whose 1934 novel The Postman Always Rings Twice has had multiple screen and stage adaptations.
It’s a bare-knuckle ride propelled by strong performances by the ever-watchable Kristen Stewart, the physically imposing Katy O’Brian and a lean and mean Ed Harris, wearing a wig that is a fright scene all on its own.
The action opens with Lou (Stewart) with her arm deep in a filthy toilet. She’s clearing a blockage at the gym she manages. As we learn more about her, that image – up to her elbows in shit – might be a metaphor for her life.
Her father, also named Lou (Harris), runs a local gun club and shooting range. It’s clear, especially through flashbacks, that his real business is illegal and violent. An FBI agent is digging around.
When a new arrival turns up at the gym, Lou’s world shifts. Jackie (O’Brian) is a bodybuilder who is hitchhiking to Las Vegas to appear in a competition. The scene where she walks into the hard-core gym and Lou watches her work out is a highlight.
Lou wants her. Love will come later, as will lies and bleeding. First comes steroids, which everyone in the gym is using. The posters on its walls declare that Only Losers Quit and Pain is Weakness Leaving the Body.
Jackie lands a job in the bar at the gun club. Harris is at peak smiling killer when he hands her a pistol and shows her how to shoot.
“You only have to be very, very gentle,’’ he tells her. When she pulls the trigger and hits the target, he adds, “A bit more powerful than a punch, eh.”
It’s a comparison a steroid-pumped Jackie soon puts to the test when she meets another part of Lou’s family, her sister Beth (Jena Malone) and her physically abusive, womanising husband, JJ (Dave Franco).
So, we have Lou and Jackie in a torrid, I’d-kill-for-you love affair, an abused sister and her abusive husband and a squalid King Lear-like father who will do whatever it takes to protect his crime business. The result sucks them all into a vortex of darkness.
This movie is the second feature of English filmmaker Rose Glass, who co-wrote the script with Weronika Tofilska. Glass’s 2019 debut, Saint Maud, is a psychological thriller about obsession with faith and religion.
There are different obsessions in this new film. One of them is escape: the desire to be more than who you are, by being a champion bodybuilder, or by not being the sort of person your father is.
This is a violent movie that will not be everyone’s cup of tea. The final act can be seen as surreal or silly. I lean to the latter.
It’s worth watching for the performances, especially by Stewart, who received an Oscar nomination for Spencer (2021), and four-time Oscar nominee Harris.
That the protagonists are queer women adds something to this take on small-town love and crime. Otherwise, however, it’s a familiar tale. Sex and violence should be part of the story, as in the excellent recent television miniseries, Love & Death, starring Elizabeth Olsen and Jesse Plemons. Here they become the whole story.
Love Lies Bleeding (MA15+)
104 minutes
In cinemas
★★★
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Comedy in wicked war of words
Remember when it was letters, not Tweets, that ruined reputations? The Marquess of Queensberry’s 1895 note to his son’s lover, Oscar Wilde, for example, that said the married writer was “posing as a somdomite (sic)”. Wilde sued for libel, but it was his reputation that was put through the wringer and landed him in jail.
There are some similarities between that notorious case and the one in the acerbic British comedy-drama Wicked Little Letters, which is based on a lesser-known true story. Sodomy is mentioned in one of the foul-mouthed letters in question, and it’s one of the milder accusations.
The setting is a Sussex seaside town in the 1920s. The letters are sent to Miss Edith Swan (the remarkable Olivia Colman), who the newspapers will come to refer to as a “childless spinster” who “reads the Bible five times a day”.
This description is seen as a positive, though perhaps, deep down, not by Edith herself. In the letters, she is described as a “foxy-arsed rabbit-f--ker” a “stinky bitch” and “a piss-country whore” who “sucks 10 c--ks a day, minimum”. This is not seen as a positive by anyone.
The moments where the letters are read out loud, by Edith, by her righteous, patriarchal father (Timothy Spall, having a ball) or by the investigating police, are fun to watch, for the looks on the faces of the reader and the listeners, while also explaining the MA15+ rating.
The presumed writer of the letters is Edith’s loose-living next-door neighbour Rose Gooding (a rambunctious Jessie Buckley), a single mum (she says her husband died in the war) who has emigrated from Ireland. She swears like a trooper, goes to the pub and drinks pints rather than halfs and has a live-in boyfriend. She makes the fair point of asking why she would write to Edith when she already “tears strips of her in the street”.
Yet, in a well-placed flashback scene, we see that when Rose first arrived, she and Edith became friends and the older woman, under the shackles of her father, saw glimpses of a more liberated way of life.
“The language you just used. Indoors. On a Wednesday,’’ Edith says as she shows Rose into her home. But she says it with a shy smile.
Their friendship falters and, in the present setting, Rose is arrested on the charge of criminal libel. Edith’s father, and therefore Edith, think it’s an open and shut case. Yet others in the small town, including a female police officer (Anjana Vasan), are not convinced she is the hand behind the papers.
The national press laps up the story and from this point the plot moves into a Who Wrote the Letters? caper that is bitingly funny and touches on issues that are as relevant today as they were 100 years ago.
This film is directed by British filmmaker Thea Shamrock and written by British comedian and actor Jonny Sweet. It’s Shamrock’s second feature, following the quite good 2016 romantic drama Me Before You, based on the novel by Jojo Moyes.
Its strengths are the performances by Colman, Buckley, Spall and, in a supporting role, Joanna Scanlan as one of the locals, a dishevelled farmer, who is in Rose’s corner. Watch for the scene where Edith is berated by her father. It shows Colman at her best.
The director and scriptwriter take some liberties with the real story. There’s a focus on misogyny, feminism and sisterhood. In that sense it’s reminding us why change had to come. There’s also an emphasis on the comedy – the script is full of decent one-liners – and there’s no crime in that.
As I watched Wicked Little Letters, which is full of the F-word and even pulls out the C-word – in a hilarious cuss-off between Rose and Edith – I thought of my mother, who strongly dislikes bad language in movies.
I swear she will like this one.
Wicked Little Letters (MA15+)
100 minutes
In cinemas