Love Lies Bleeding

Rose Glass' follow up to Saint Maud has style and energy to burn, not least in the heat that rises between its stars Kristen Stewart and Katy O'Brian. Clint Mansell's pulsing score is an early indicator that everything will be hot and heavy - from sex to violence - in this pulp noir tale.

It's the late Eighties and Stewart's mousy and wiry Lou works in the sort of low-rent, small-town gym where leg warmers would not be welcome. You can smell the tang of the place just by looking at it even before we see Lou cleaning the loo. Jackie (O'Brian) is a bodybuilder with a near elemental physicality. She's just getting by while just passing through on the way to a contest in Vegas when she strays into Lou's orbit.The connection is intense and immediate and one which quickly sees Lou invested in Jackie's as a lover and as a potential route out of her current existence, including her troubled relationship with her kingpin father Lou Sr (Ed Harris). But the steroids she sets Jackie up with soon start to exert compulsions of their own.

Everything in Glass's film is pushed to its bulging excess, including Lou's brother-in-law JJ's (Dave Franco) abusive attitude towards her sister Beth (Jena Malone). This, in turn, pushes Jackie's buttons triggering the first of the film's violent outbursts - actions which in Glass' world, always have messy consequences, including bodies that are in need of disposal.

There's no doubt that by presenting several characters as pure id is quite a dangerous gambit for a filmmaker but Glass keeps things interesting by having them driven by different things. This means that Jackie's desires, stretched to Incredible Hulk proportions, might include Lou, but they are radically different from those of small-town, differently drug-addicted Daisy (played with a scuzzy magnetism by Anna Baryshnikov), who is equally besotted. This leaves Lou as the only character with a defined ego and superego with a hell of a battle on her hands to exert any sort of firm control.

Glass does not hold back, taking a full-throttle roid-rage approach as Jackie becomes increasingly unhinged. She leans into the sweaty surreality to such a degree towards the end that less accommodating viewers may feel that taking things into completely gonzo territory is a hell of a way to avoid tricky late-stage plot manoeuvring - even if she does go on to stick the landing.

The style may ultimately trump the substance but, as Lou Sr would doubtless tell you, you get a lot of points for a clean execution.