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Love Lies Bleeding Needs More Than Violence and Grandeur
Rose Glass’ new thriller, starring Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian, is passionate and bold, but can rely too much on stylized glimpses of gore.
In the gym where much of Rose Glass’s ultraviolent and ultra-sexy romantic thriller Love Lies Bleeding takes place, and where the film’s star-crossed lovers Lou (Kristen Stewart) and Jackie (Katy O’Brian) meet, the walls are covered in posters offering pump-it-up platitudes: Pain Is Weakness Leaving the Body, Only Losers Quit, and so on. Although we first meet Jackie as she’s having unpleasant sex inside a Camaro with Lou’s bemulleted shithead brother-in-law JJ (Dave Franco) in exchange for a job, and we then see her sleeping beneath a highway overpass, the character nevertheless bounces through each scene with clear-eyed, all-American optimism. Guns, body-building, Camaros, Vegas, a sense of purpose in the West — it was quite charming hearing at the post-screening Q&A that Glass had originally planned to set the movie in Scotland before realizing that it needed “the scale of America.”
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