The bulk of Love Lies Bleeding is a brilliantly acted, thoroughly engrossing, slow spiral into increasingly violent, desperate and complicated circumstances. J.J.’s actions set the characters on a crash course in which people are killed, bodies are concealed, traps are set, lines are blurred and allegiances are changed. At its core, the film is about love and monstrousness and how the two can intersect. But it’s also about broken families, lonely people and corrupt systems.
If Love Lies Bleeding had successfully retained that tone and momentum throughout, it could have been a damn-near perfect movie. Where it throws itself drunkenly off a cliff is in trying too hard to labor its main raison d’être: the idea that love is capable of driving people to unthinkable actions.
Once the main characters are all thoroughly tied up in each other’s bad decisions, the script can’t quite figure out a sensible way to resolve itself. And with that, writer-director Rose Glass throws out the low-key, synth-enhanced, grimy sexiness that originally set the tone in favor of cartoonish imagery, a sharp shift into surreality and, worse still, plot holes.