Movie Review: ‘Love Lies Bleeding’ is peak Kristen Stewart

Muscles ripple, veins pop and electronic music throbs in “Love Lies Bleeding,” a heaving, hyper-sexy neo-noir drenched in sweat, blood and bug guts. Heavy doses of melodrama and flashy surrealism sap some of the lurid spell of “Love Lies Bleeding.” But this feels tantalizingly close to the idealized version of a Kristen Stewart film. Glass, the British filmmaker whose 2019 horror film “Saint Maud” marked an exciting debut, opens “Love Lies Bleeding” on a slightly magical note, gazing at the stars. The real magic will come later in “Love Lies Bleeding,” but not for JJ, whose abusiveness to his wife and Lou’s sister Beth leads to a bloody series of events that reluctantly bring Lou into increasingly closer orbit with the estranged father she resents, Lou Sr. All of this proceeds, in a way, out of the love that blooms between Lou and Jackie. Jackie’s roid-addled disturbia is a factor, too, making “Love Lies Bleeding” an interesting corollary to the unreleased Jonathan Majors bodybuilder film “Magazine Dreams,” not to mention “The Iron Claw,” another beefy A24 film about family rot and muscle-building.