Watching Kristen Stewart is at all times an journey. A performer who makes good films higher and dreary films tolerable, she has a restlessness that has made her one of many extra fascinating points of interest in American movie. She has a present for making a personality’s inside life transparently readable, and whereas she could be delicate and withholding, it’s her fascinatingly unquiet presence that attracts you in, an itchy depth that may preserve her (and also you) on edge. Pauline Kael wrote that Jane Fonda’s “motor runs just a little quick” — so does Stewart’s.
In her newest car, “Love Lies Bleeding,” a neo-noir in a violent and winkingly nasty key, Stewart performs Lou, quick for Louise, a small-town loner someplace in New Mexico, craving to flee a traditional lifeless finish. If this had been a Forties noir, Lou could be fixing jalopies in a dingy storage whereas ready for a dame to walk in to alter his destiny. That’s kind of what occurs right here, besides that it’s the ’80s, and Lou is a girl who works in a health club the place she’s losing away, unclogging bathrooms and slipping steroids to bulked-up juicers. Then, a gorgeous stranger walks into the health club and modifications her life, as sirens generally do in films.
The stranger, Jackie (an excellent, bodily imposing Katy O’Brian), instantly catches Lou’s eye. It’s future, Previous Hollywood type, and it lights the film up and units it on its incendiary approach. What occurs is scorching, yummy stuff, however romances like these want one thing to get of their approach, whether or not it’s a bag of loot, a jealous ex or only a contrivance. This film obliges with violence, plenty of weapons, spooky flashbacks and a traditional villain, performed by a improbable Ed Harris with a sneer and an epically horrible wig. There’s a variety of extravagantly and comically unhealthy hair in “Love Lies Bleeding,” together with equally rotten enamel and souls.
It’s an excellent guess that the director Rose Glass (“Saint Maud”) has learn James M. Cain or seen a few of the movies produced from his hard-boiled books; she might have thumbed by means of just a few Jim Thompson novels, too. (Glass wrote the script with Weronika Tofilska.) “Love Lies Bleeding” isn’t on par with Cain or Thompson, and overselling a comparability could be foolish. Even so, when Jackie first walks into the health club, the world-altering impact she has on Lou remembers the second when the drifter in “The Postman At all times Rings Twice” meets his kismet: “Then I noticed her,” he says, “her lips caught out in a approach that made me need to mash them in for her.”