Love Lies Bleeding Review - A Sexually Revolting Romantic Thriller With No Context

Love Lies Bleeding Review: Back in the early 30s, there was a pre-code era. The movie code changed again in the early 80s, giving full freedom to the filmmakers to go all out with their wild content, and then we got a new "ratings" system. In today's time, it's quite easy to make sexually explicit movies, even without straight-gender affairs. Sometimes it helps the filmmakers to get a soft corner from critics and audiences for the gutsy content and severe presentation. Love Lies Bleeding has it all—wild romance of lesbians, sexually stimulating scenes, revenge theories, and uncompromised physical presentation—but has it got a storyline to match all these things? The answer is a big NO. A sensible romance like Portrait of a Lady on Fire comes once in a while to teach lessons to all the filmmakers on "how it's done." Love Lies Bleeding has no context to cover its bisexual and lesbian theories, further weakened by a ridiculously fantasized climax.Set in the late 19th century, Love Lies Bleeding tells the story of a reclusive gym manager, Lou (Kristen Stewart), who is part of a crime family. Her relationship with her father is only for a name, since she has abandoned him owing to some past trauma related to her mother. Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov) has a crush on Lou and even dares to make sexual advances towards her, but all in vain. Lou then starts fancying an ambitious bodybuilder, Jackie (Katy O'Brian), who is soon going to participate in a bodybuilding competition in Vagas. In their first meeting, they come close and begin a strong sexual and romantic relationship. During this period, Katy becomes emotionally attached to Lou's problems, one of which is her sister's brutal and violent husband. Interestingly, Katy had a paid sexual encounter with that man before meeting Lou. When Lou is upset and angry about him beating her sister, Katy takes a bold step to make things "right," leading both of them into a jam. Will they be able to get out of it and keep their relationship intact?Rose Glass and Weronika Tofilska's script has some sexually arousing moments in the first half, many of which will be censored in India. It's some different kind of fun to watch all this erotic drama with such characters—one with handsome muscular physics and another one with a standard female body. The conversions about "using fingers" and "bisexuality" sound too bold for the film set in the 1890s. Yet we have to go along just to please the hidden, lusty side in all of us. However, the second half goes too bad, too rubbish to be passed on. That entire crime angle—killings, psychological trauma, revenge, and redemption—don't make no sense. Katy suddenly grows to be an enormous beast—a scene that would perfectly fit a werewolf movie, and mind you, this wasn't it. A trained cop can miss easy shots on Lou, but she, without seeing the target, would hit it right. Daisy's suspense in the last scene will force you to laugh at the writers' maturity. So, there is a whole bag of problems that makes this film a big mess, and I wouldn't overlook any of them.Kristen Stewart has gone wild in this erotic thriller, which was required for the context. Her physical appearance and expressions speak a lot, even though dialogues fail to make any impression. Katy O'Brian's muscular body will have many drooling (of those sexes) over her, but let me tell you something about the performance that has come unexpectedly. In that ramp scene, her expressions were on-point. One can feel that pain, even though the scene is spoiled by illogical trauma, which turns into vomiting. Ed Harris surprises with his uncanny appearance and that good-for-nobody attitude. "You don't know anything about love," says Jena Malone, Lou's sister, and we all feel pity for her. Not because she actually loved her husband, but because she looked so dumb there. Anna Baryshnikov actually looked cute and beautiful, while Dave Franco was fairly good in his small role.Ben Fordesman's camerawork was revealing in those closeups of intimate scenes, while the background score felt too loud sometimes. Clint Mansell's music found some suitable tunes for those particular scenes and times. The editing by Mark Towns keeps you hooked, despite the flawed climax. Coming after that sweet little film, Saint Maud (2019), Rose Glass attempts to break some glasses here but only makes noise; no impact. Love Lies Bleeding could be seen as an erotic thriller, but the sexual segments aren't really connected to what goes wrong here. It battles to find its identity as a romantic thriller and finds some reasons to make us believe in it, but then it again loses steam by the river's end. The climax is a major fallout here and plays a big spoilsport. Rose could have written a better and more believable story than this utterly messy erotic-romance-revenge-thriller-fantasy-sports-drama and what else she only knows. As a whole, I can say that Love Lies Bleeding lies low.