Movie Review: 'Love Lies Bleeding' is peak Kristen Stewart
Muscles ripple, veins pop and electronic music throbs in “Love Lies Bleeding,” a heaving, hyper-sexy neo-noir drenched in sweat, blood and bug guts.
If that last one seems a touch less expected, that moment, courtesy of a beetle-chomping Ed Harris, is far from the only off-the-wall provocation in Rose Glass’s film, a pulpy, fable-like lesbian crime thriller where bodies, large and small, get ravaged beneath starry desert skies.
Not all of it works. Heavy doses of melodrama and flashy surrealism sap some of the lurid film. Stewart has been one of the most electric stars for years. But “Love Lies Bleeding,” in which she plays a cynical gym worker named Lou who falls in love with a body-building drifter, (Katy O’Brian), gives Stewart a vivid noir sandbox where all of her talent for obsession, desire and rage finds its gnarliest expression yet.
