Rent Love Lies Bleeding (2024)

Energetic revenge thriller with touches of black humour - Love Lies Bleeding review by PD

This one veers from noir to revenge thriller to horror to pitch-black comedy via moments of magic realism, with the result that the overall effect is something of a mess, but there’s never a dull moment, and the film pulses with an irresistible energy. Set in a small desert town in rural grunge New Mexico in 1989, the film centres around the extreme, often violent, intensity of the relationship between gym manager Lou (Kristen Stewart) and Jackie (Katy O'Brian). There's serious chemistry between the two, with Stewart investing the role with an avid hunger, stripping away her normally cool façade to give the film a charged centre of vulnerability. The film starts off lean and mean, then grows slowly and steadily more delirious, particularly as the other major character, Lou’s estranged father, Lou Sr., played by Ed Harris, becomes increasingly important. Unfortunately, as this happens our investment in the central couple – both rather underwritten – vanishes by the minute, overtaken as the film then is with rather too much noise and nastiness for my liking, although the brief bursts of Anna Baryshnikov, stealing scenes as an excitable gossip, are very well done. Glass forces some big, but rather silly swings in the last act (the biggest of which is quite literally too big), but by this time the plot has run out of gas, and only some amusing light touches involving cats and carpets rescue the heaviness of the action. All in all both watchable but ultimately forgettable.