By Michael Marano

Love Lies Bleeding is a glorious work of sweaty, dusty, pulp filmmaking.

Love Lies Bleeding, directed by Rose Glass. Screening at Coolidge Corner Theatre, Kendall Square Cinema, AMC Boston Common,  Alamo Drafthouse, and other area movie houses.

Katy O’Brian (left) and Kristen Stewart in Love Lies Bleeding. Courtesy of Sundance

Technically, Love Lies Bleeding, Rose Glass’s follow-up to her brilliant debut feature Saint Maude, didn’t have to be set in 1989. The story could have been told very easily in the present day, and thereby save the production a dump truck of cash by not spending resources to create a 1989 mise-en-scène.

But aesthetically, the film had to be set in 1989.

The vibe of the movie, its emotional beats, its dangerous, simmering sexuality, is a throwback to the era that brought us such neo-noirs as Body Heat, Dressed to Kill, House of Games, Fatal Attraction, Siesta, Slam Dance, Against All Odds, The Last Seduction, Body Double, etc. In the ’40s, noir reflected post-WWII alienation, the anxiety of consumerism, and the new empowerment of women, which was refracted in the figure of the femme fatale. The noir of the ’80s, often marketed as “erotic thrillers,” twitched with worries about the Reaganite transformation of the economy, the War on Drugs, and advent of AIDS.

If Love Lies Bleeding didn’t have some kind of dialogue or engagement with those ’80s neo-noirs, a lot of its considerable emotional force would have been weakened.

The movie, about lesbian gym worker Lou (Kristen Stewart) finding love with body builder Jackie (Katy O’Brian), only to be drawn into an ever-escalating series of criminal entanglements, fueled in part by Jackie’s steroid use, is lit and shot like an ’80s hangover brought on by flat, room temperature Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers, and coke cut with off-brand baby laxatives. This is the burnt-out late ’80s, obnoxiously pastel-colored but still washed-out and seedy.

The film’s queer protagonists are the inverse of the neo-noir femme fatale figure that reached its ’90s apotheosis in the form of Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction. Lou and Jackie don’t act out of their strength as women, but out of a desperation rooted in a lack of power and endemic marginalization. And their plight exudes a distinctly “Bush 41/Family Values” kind of air … a cultural vibe that would climax a couple of years later, when Thelma and Louise zoomed their convertible off a cliff.

As with Saint Maude, the neon glare of Love Lies Bleeding is intrusive, as brutal to the eye as candy-colored cataracts. And, like Saint Maude, the narrative is an essay on loneliness, on the desperate bonding of people in pressure cooker situations. In Saint Maude, loneliness and desperation were the fruits of isolation. In Love Lies Bleeding, the loneliness is more insidious. It’s the isolating claustrophobia of not being alone, of having people too close to you, of the inability to escape the handful of people in your life who limit you, and by so limiting you, may as well be strangers. The town in this movie is suffocating, because there only seem to be five people living in it.

Glass seems to be continuing her dialogue with Martin Scorsese… Saint Maude was a riff on Taxi Driver, and Love Lies Bleeding, with its explosions of brutality and midnight body dumps in the desert, might well be a riff on Casino.

This is the story of liminal people, living in a Touch of Evil–like border town that festers with crime. Lou’s dad (Ed Harris, exuding the warmth and hardiness of a hastily unwrapped mummy and sporting a wig that makes him look like an anime wizard) is the local gun runner. Harris oozes jaded malevolence. He’s a big fish in a small pond and he’s just fine with that: he will do anything to preserve it. It’s one thing to watch ruthless violence and corruption in a Godfather movie, where the stakes are high. It’s another to see violence and corruption in a one-Blockbuster town. Because the stakes are so low, the movie has an air of Jim Thompson-like fatigued existential ruthlessness. Murder becomes just a fucking chore and the physical and emotional abuse of women by assholes in shitty mullets is as calmly accepted as the weather.

The collision of Lou and Jackie’s love story — which includes the shooting up of steroids as a flirtatious “meet cute” kind of foreplay — with Harris’s criminal enterprises escalates brilliantly. There’s a gut-dropping sense that fate has it in for the girls. That feeling of destiny — blended with all the moral corruption and evil Harris and his minions perpetuate against the backdrop of washed-out, exhausted ’80s excess — infuses Love Lies Bleeding with a sense that reality is frighteningly brittle.

And it’s reality’s frailty that allows Glass to dip her toes into surrealism. There are moments of flat-out Cronenberg-ian body horror, and other Aronofsky-like moments of physicality pushed to its limits (think The Wrestler and Black Swan) and Requiem for a Dream-like drug-induced hallucinations.

But Glass pushes that dream-spinning a little too far at the movie’s climax. The misstep derails the narrative and unravels all the really fine grit and sleaze that had given the movie so much of its punch and power up to that point.

Still, despite this fumble on the one-yard line, Love Lies Bleeding is a glorious work of sweaty, dusty pulp filmmaking.

Novelist, writing instructor, and personal trainer Michael Marano started reviewing movies professionally in 1990. In that capacity, he has taken pride in never spoiling a film’s plot, but feels obliged to let readers know that in Love Lies Bleeding, THE CAT LIVES! You can relax. Nothing bad happens to the kitty.  www.BluePencilMike.com