'Love Lies Bleeding' review: Ultraviolent lesbian thriller has heart

A sense of looming dread hangs like a fog over "Love Lies Bleeding," the dusty, grungy romantic thriller that starts like a nightmare and ends somewhere inside a hyper fantasy.

Co-writer and director Rose Glass ("Saint Maud") directs this neo-noir with a sure hand and a dazzling sense of stylish abandon. And she gets fully committed performances from her lead actresses, who play a pair of star-crossed lovers barreling toward ruin in a truck with no brakes.

Kristen Stewart is Lou, a manager at a gym in middle-of-nowhere New Mexico in 1989. We meet her as she's unclogging a toilet. Stewart has always had a sense of cool energy about her but here she's all nervous tics, unease and bad hair. She listens to cassette tapes to quit smoking, but the lessons aren't taking.

At the gym one day she spots a drifter, fresh into town from Oklahoma, and her perfectly sculpted body and curly locks have Lou in a flop sweat. She's Jackie, played by "The Mandalorian's" Katy O'Brian, and it's immediately clear these two are going to ignite and burn anyone who gets too close to the flame.

Turns out there are plenty of people in their path. There's sleazeball J.J. (Dave Franco), whom Jackie happens to hook up with on her way into town — she's bi-, she says — and who happens to be married to Lou's sister Beth (Jena Malone), whom he regularly abuses. Tightening the circle, J.J. sets Jackie up with a job waitressing tables at an outdoor gun range which is run by Lou's father Lou Sr., who's played by a menacing Ed Harris, who possesses a glare so evil it could wake the dead and then kill them again. (Harris is a beast as a scuzzy criminal you do not want to mess with, and it's worth noting that at 73 he's still delivering absolute heater performances.)

Lou supplies her new squeeze with steroids she scores from the gym rats at work, which help Jackie tone up for the bodybuilding contest she hopes to enter in Las Vegas. But they're changing her chemistry — as is Lou's love — and we see and hear Jackie's body morphing, which boils over into a stomach-churning outburst when Jackie confronts J.J. and leaves him without a lower jaw, a bit of shock violence that recalls 2011's "Drive." Now Lou and Jackie have a body to dispose of, and it won't be their last.

It goes without saying that the times in the late 1980s were not as LGBTQ+-friendly as they are now, so the backdrop lends a sense of claustrophobia to Lou's life. And Glass' details — the grime of both the setting and the storytelling — add to the hopeless, dizzying sense of romance that quickly blossoms between Lou and Jackie. Even as her world crashes and burns around her, Lou is finally given something to live for.

Clint Mansell's pulsating score gives the film a dark, synth-pop edge, which carries it even as it enters flights of fancy. "Love Lies Bleeding" is a worthy entrant to the doomed lovers canon, where even a mounting body count is no match for the power of true romance.

agraham@detroitnews.com

'Love Lies Bleeding'

GRADE: B

Rated R: for violence and grisly images, sexual content, nudity, language throughout and drug use

Running time: 104 minutes

In theaters