My reaction to the overall visual and aural aesthetic of Rose Glass’s thriller was obviously affected by other recent movies that looked and sounded the same, in particular the work of the Safdie brothers and Mandy, the Nicolas Cage vehicle that many feel is some kind of genius reworking of the splatter genre. There’s something both gritty and calculated about these films, which put on a show of minute-to-minute risk-taking that can spin your head around. And in the present case for once I think the Japanese title matches the movie better than the original one. Love on Steroids is more accurately descriptive of the film’s presentation than Love Lies Bleeding, which, after all, is the title of an Elton John song. For one thing, a character actually injects steroids and suffers mightily for it. Her love, however, is not only undiminished in the process, but becomes as enhanced as her physique.

Her name is Jackie, and she’s played by Katy O’Brien, who juggles acting with a passion for martial arts, which comes in handy in the film. It’s 1989, and Jackie, an adopted orphan, has left what sounds like a broken home in Oklahoma in order to participate in a bodybuilding contest in Vegas, stopping off along the way in a beat-up New Mexico town to sleep rough and get in some workouts at a local gym, where she hooks up with the manager, Lou (Kristen Stewart), a cynical but vulnerable loner. They embark on a passionate love affair before Lou realizes that Jackie has scored a part-time job at her father (Ed Harris, with ridiculous hair extensions) Lou Sr.’s shooting range. Lou is effectively estranged from her dad for reasons that soon become clear, but in any case, Jackie finds out that the dysfunctions of Lou’s family are more serious than even hers, since Lou Sr. is the town’s resident crime kingpin whose main line of work is running guns into Mexico. But the dysfunction is mainly represented by Lou’s mulleted brother-in-law, JJ (Dave Franco), who is abusive toward her beloved sister, Beth (Jena Malone). Once Lou starts passing on human growth hormones to her new lover in an attempt to help her with the contest, things get hairy fast, with Jackie redirecting her urge for retribution against those who once abused her. 

The most convincing element of Glass’s and Weronika Tofilska’s script is the love story. We only learn of these two women’s backgrounds in sparingly offered tidbits of information, but the two actors are so into their roles that we can see the damage their characters have suffered in every gesture and line. Their coming together feels not only natural but somehow preordained, and that passion makes up for a lot of the silliness that drives the plotting, which turns gory and campily regressive as the movie proceeds. People die in gratuitous fashion, and some of the killings are morally questionable, especially when they’re carried out by sympathetic characters. The aforementioned style seems designed to get us to accept these inconsistencies, as if they’re the sort of things that should happen in a movie that looks and sounds like this, but while I enjoyed it up to a point, by the end the violence aims for nothing more than sensation. 

Opens Aug. 29 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Shibuya Parco White Cine Quinto (03-6712-7225).

Love Lies Bleeding home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2023 Crack in the Earth LLC; Channel Four Television Corporation