The last movie I saw before the world shut down was Saint Maud, a feverish psycho-religious horror film from rookie director Rose Glass. I was in the screening room on March 10, 2020, the day before the NBA officially announced our shit was fucked. Maud’s final hellscream was my last cinema memory for the whole next phase of history. Weird way to enter lockdown, but a filmmaker like Glass gives you hope for the future. Love Lies Bleeding is her textbook sophomore effort — bigger stars, vaster locations, saucier twists – and it proves her debut’s tonal-shift rollick was just the beginning. I’m glad I caught it in theaters, and I suspect it will blow up on streaming.
Kristen Stewart plays Lou, a loner who works the desk at Crater Gym. It’s 1989, so fitness isn’t chic and steroids are chill. Lou has never strayed beyond New Mexico, and not because she digs living local. Her brother-in-law (Dave Franco) beats her sister (Jena Malone). Her eerie dad (Ed Harris) runs a gun range, which is a hell of a flag for a plot to plant. She’s gay, which isn’t a barrelful of laughs in Dan Quayle’s America. Then comes the wanderer. Jackie (Katy O’Brian) lives rough on the street, but her weightlifter’s bod is statue-cut with “serious lanes.” Her and Lou have a meet-cute I’ve never seen before. There’s a fight and a rather sweet injection. They have sex and they have breakfast.
Jackie plans to win an upcoming bodybuilding competition in Vegas. She’s got big dreams, and both women start imagining a new Muscle Beach-type life on the coast. Then Lou’s sister lands in the hospital with her head beaten open. Lou wants her brother-in-law dead. You have some sense where this is going – romance, vengeance, shiny-grime desert noir — but there are things I haven’t mentioned. The FBI is asking questions about Lou’s parents. PEDs roil Jackie with hallucinations of her muscles enlarging in skin-rippling bio-quakes. (At least, I think those are hallucinations.) Jackie knows the brother-in-law a little too well. And Lou keeps flashing back to some long-ago gunfire night.
Stewart and O’Brian spark a couple ways, passionate but suspicious. Is Jackie using Lou for a crashpad and free workouts? Should we worry how much Lou is pushing that anabolic syringe? Glass has a gift for tapdancing in and around her characters’ perspective. In Saint Maud, a hospice nurse comes off like a Christly innocent, and then God gives her an orgasm. Here, even as you feel the world is stacked against the women, there’s real dark comedy seeing how badly they screw each other up.
Another movie I saw in 2020 right before theaters went dark was Underwater, a gem of January trash. On the bottom of the ocean, Stewart was bleached and buzzed, and at a critical moment she donned a Gears of War-looking SCUBA suit. Not one of her classier ventures — the woman won a César — but the film’s escalating madness tapped her peculiar star quality better than something like the flailing farce of Charlie’s Angels. With Stewart, you come for the uncoiling. Lou is wound up tight with cynicism and fury, plus serious fears about her family. Jackie is her gateway drug, whose arrival leads Lou to unbury her own secrets. O’Brian’s an ideal partner for Stewart, shading fragility into her character’s nomadic toughness.
I had a bizarrely specific reaction to Saint Maud. Half an hour in, I felt like I was watching a wild-eyed masterpiece. By the end, I thought: “Hey, that was pretty good!” That happened again here, and if the praise sounds backhanded, it’s only because Glass is much better with scene-setting and character texture than with her genres’ plot mechanics. Maud played with horror clichés, then gave in to familiar-feeling bedlam. Love has a couple critical late scenes that go big stylistically while ignoring certain basic logic questions, like why who goes where when.
Glass is after something, though. Cinematographer Ben Fordesman films Albuquerque with midnight fluorescence. (When Jackie wakes up under a freeway, the underpass is lollipop orange.) People keep doing bad things poorly, improvising Coen-y crimes. Right up to the end, I didn’t know if this Love story was a caper or a tragedy. When the credits rolled on the gobsmacking final shot, I still wasn’t sure.