'Love Lies Bleeding' serves up erotic, bloody mayhem

When we first meet Kristen Stewart’s harried gym manager Lou, she’s got an arm up to her elbow in a clogged toilet, the contents of which will soon get a glamorous, screen-filling closeup. The shot elicited shrieks at my screening and serves as a fitting introduction to writer-director Rose Glass’s gleefully grody sophomore effort, “Love Lies Bleeding.” A freaky-deaky film noir steeped in body horror and bodily fluids – precious and otherwise – it’s a sicko comic cross between the Coen brothers and David Cronenberg, a twisted sister to last month’s “Drive-Away Dolls” in what’s turning out to be a terrific spring for sexed-up, lesbian crime pictures. But be forewarned: the humor here is of a far darker shade than in Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s frisky farce. The pulp paperback title “Love Lies Bleeding” could also double as a list of ingredients.

The year is 1989, and the sullen Stewart is not exactly setting new standards for friendly customer service while peddling steroids behind the counter of a crummy fitness club in a barren New Mexico backwater. The gym is owned by her old man, Lou Sr. (Ed Harris), a shifty gun runner with whom she’s no longer on speaking terms, for reasons that will eventually become obvious. Lou dotes on her dim-bulb sister Beth (Jena Malone), who usually has a black eye or a split lip that she claims came from a household accident, but was obviously the work of J.J. (Dave Franco, wearing the world’s worst mullet) her brutish goon of a husband who works in various extra-legal capacities for Lou Sr.

Into all this gloomy dysfunction glides Katy O’Brien’s Jackie, an impossibly hunky female bodybuilder hoping to hitchhike her way to a competition in Las Vegas. With her and Lou it’s lust at first sight. Glass shoots their trysts as sweaty, slightly scary reveries of engorged musculature. Stewart’s Lou quickly becomes pusher, trainer and all-around sugar mommy to the younger athlete, helping O’Brien’s Jackie do chin-ups by waving a Zippo lighter beneath her bare feet. (It’s not for nothing that the characters are seen reading Pat Califia’s BDSM short story collection “Macho Sluts.”) Of course our two lovers are bound to get mixed up in Lou Sr.’s business, but Glass has a good time queering up the typical crime movie template. After all, it’s hard to follow a film noir formula when you’ve got two femme fatales and they’re both pretty butch.

“Love Lies Bleeding'' starts out like one of those rural neo-noirs from the era in which it is set, lifting elements from the Coens’ “Blood Simple” and James Foley’s “At Close Range” before blossoming into something much stranger and all its own. (You can see hints from the beginning in the deliberately artificial, otherworldly cast to these starry night skies.) We get glimpses of flashbacks to Lou’s childhood filmed in hellfire red, a crevasse in the desert looming like something from a lunar landscape. But it’s when the ‘roids start going to work on Jackie that the movie’s POV slips into the surreal. Anyone who saw Glass’ gnarly debut “Saint Maud'' already knows she’s got a thing for fleshy self-mutilation, and this one goes all out with a hallucinatory Sin City sequence featuring the town’s most memorable barfing scene since “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.”

It's wild, this movie. I’m honestly not sure if “Love Lies Bleeding” adds up to all that much in the end – I felt the same way about “Saint Maud” – but its sheer audacity is sure something to see. The cast needs to be commended first for their commitment to these heroically terrible hairdos. Harris is playing one of those guys who compensated for losing it all on the top of his head by growing out the sides, to such an absurd extent he looks like a redneck Tolkien character. I didn’t recognize Dave Franco until the closing credits, though to be fair, my view was obscured at points by not just his wig but also the most sickeningly convincing busted jaw in the history of movies. (You can call the film unhinged in more ways than one.)

Stewart caused a mildly hilarious conservative meltdown last month when she posed for a Rolling Stone cover story in a jockstrap, an instantly iconic image and shrewd promotional match for a movie messing around with gender roles. It’s the kind of provocation we’ve come to expect from the most exciting actress of her generation, and Stewart’s trademark minimalism is put to smart use here grounding an increasingly outlandish film. There’s a great running gag in which her character is trying to quit smoking – not an easy thing to do when you’re also trying to cover up multiple murders – and the deadpan manner with which Stewart regards a discarded pack of cigarettes at a grisly crime scene prompts one of this year’s loudest laughs. Indeed, the ghoulishly amusing final shot relies on her exquisite comic timing while banished to the background of the frame. Not many performers can be so funny from so far away.

“Love Lies Bleeding” is now in theaters.