The second feature film from Rose Glass is one of the most vital, unpredictable thrillers of recent years, a pulpy, jet black thriller of corruption and murder, with a surprisingly tender love story at its heart.

One of my favourite kinds of sub-genres is the seedy, steamy neo-noirs that emerged after the Coen Brothers‘ debut, Blood Simple. Films like One False Move, The Grifters, After Dark, My Sweet and Red Rock West, sweaty, seedy crime thrillers that follow double-crossing drifters and the trouble they get themselves in.

Set in a New Mexico town in the eighties, Lou (Kristen Stewart) is the manager of a cheap, run down gym, owned by her criminal father, Lou Sr (Ed Harris). Introduced unblocking a toilet, she has a mundane existence, chained to the town by a sense of loyalty to her sister (Jena Malone) and her abusive husband (Dave Franco). When drifter and aspiring bodybuilder Jackie (Katy O’Brian) arrives in town, the two immediately hit it off, and begin a whirlwind romance that quickly changes Lou’s life, for better and for worse.

Katy O’Brian is rightly getting a lot of attention for her role as the aspiring body-builder and it’s an incredibly authentic, raw performance. She does an excellent job balancing Jack’s relative innocence with an impulsiveness and a quick temper that makes her a liability. However, as impressive as O’Brian is, for me it’s Stewart who walks away with the film with the more low-key role.

Rocking a ratty hairstyle and a subdued, antisocial attitude, she gives an understated performance full of delicate subtleties. Stewart has long ago demonstrated her acting range – she was incredible in Spencer and was my favourite thing about David Cronenberg’s Crimes Of The Future, where some of her performance choices were off the wall but perfect, and she makes similar unconventional choices here. She fully inhabits her character, and there are so many off-hand line deliveries that are just perfectly judged. Her response to seeing someone get shot in front of her is as laugh-out loud funny as it is shocking.

What distinguishes Love Lies Bleeding from the Jim Thompson style of noir that Glass is emulating is the motivations of its central couple. Generally in noir, greed is the motivating factor – a hapless protagonist is duped or otherwise compelled into committing a crime to get money, usually by an alluring femme fatale. In Love Lies Bleeding, both main characters are driven predominantly by love – the two leads take some drastic measures to protect each other, but it all comes from such a wholesome place, and Stewart and O’Brian have a natural chemistry, that you can’t help but root for them.

Glass does an admirable job of depicting a real town of grotesques. There’s a scuzziness to every character, from Ed Harris as the chilling but bizarrely coiffured gunrunner and Anna Baryshnikov’s yellow-toothed hanger-on all the way to Dave Franco sporting a look seemingly inspired by Aaron Eckhart in Nurse Betty.

The film continually flits between realism and fantasy, and is replete with cinematic touchstones while remaining entirely its own thing. There are moments of neon drenched cinematography, accompanied by Clint Mansell‘s pulpy synth score that recall Drive or The Guest. The fascination with Jackie’s increasingly hulking frame and her over-reliance on steroids adds a dose of surrealism to the film, with disturbing imagery and sound design that’s reminiscent of Cronenberg, culminating in a sequence that reminded me of the most disturbing moment in Alex Garland’s Men.

However the relationship at the centre of Love Lies Bleeding grounds the film in reality, and is a refreshingly unconventional dynamic (at least on film). In her excellent essay on the film for Curzon, Billie Walker praised the unconventional dynamic of the skinny butch and the muscular femme, which works incredibly well here. It’s Lou who is the hardened , emotionally shut off one, while Jack is the naive dreamer, intent on getting to Las Vegas for her bodybuilding show. Despite the seedy nature of the film, and the cynical nature of the characters, the central romance is depicted with a sincerity that is genuinely sweet, even when it gets steamy in scenes that put Bound to shame. Both are tomboys who mask their insecurities or emotional fragility with a no-nonsense, detached outward persona, so it’s inevitably touching when they break through to each other.

Glass slips into the neo-noir aesthetic effortlessly, and shows a real lightness of touch in her direction. The plot unfolds with an urgency and an economy that means the pacing never lags for even a minute (helped by some immaculate editing). Glass feels so at home in this genre territory, and yet she shows an admirable amount of restraint in the numerous scenes of violence. One particularly grisly detail is made all the more gruesome for the fact that it’s only briefly shown – first shot from a distance, and then only shown in the most fleeting glimpses.

The climax resembles the similarly bonkers ending to her debut film Saint Maud. Like the simultaneously hilarious and horrific moment that closes that film, the big moment here blurs the line between reality and imagination, and might prove divisive, and yet it worked for me on an emotional level, and on a figurative level. It’s a gambit that is both surreal and entirely in keeping with the film’s themes regarding body image, and the perceived threat to masculinity posed by strong female bodies. It seems bizarre in the moment, but it lands really well, and I found myself suppressing a smile in the subsequent scene. For all the death and trauma they go through, the film manages to end on an uplifting, even joyous note (one that is only slightly undercut by the films grim coda)

A pulpy love story, Love Lies Bleeding is a lean, visceral film that is an anarchic success on all fronts, delivering some truly heart-in-mouth moments alongside genuine laughs in the form of Stewart’s pitch perfect character choices. An assured second film, Glass has made a subversive genre piece while never losing sight of her own unique aesthetic, fully delivering on the promise of her debut and then some.

Love Lies Bleeding is in UK and Irish cinemas now