Sundance 2024 Film Reviews: “Love Lies Bleeding” & “A Different Man”

• Tweet
• Email

• Tweet
• Email

LOVE LIES BLEEDING (A24 – March 8):  Rose Glass has followed her brilliant horror movie Saint Maud by exchanging austerity for pulp.  Love Lies Bleeding (co-written with Weronika Tofilska) is engulfed by the spirit of overripeness, to the point where it embraces the garish and even tbe flat-out ludicrous.  The film doesn’t entirely work, but it’s quite a ride.  The setting is a barren southwestern town controlled by gangster Lou Sr (Ed Harris, chewing on more than the scenery).  His properties include the local boxing gym, run by his daughter Lou (Kristen Stewart), whose off-duty life is mostly consumed by hating her father, trying to protect her sister Beth (Jena Malone) from the battery of Beth’s violent husband JJ (Dave Franco), and avoiding the advances of Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov).  None of them is happy, but there’s a certain equilibrium to their misery.  All that changes with the arrival of Jackie (Katy O’Brian), a bodybuilder on her way to a tournament in Las Vegas who becomes Lou’s instant, ravenous obsession.  (One of Lou’s first romantic gestures is providing Jackie with steroids.)  Graphic sex and then violence ensue, escalating beyond even genre boundaries, and culminating in a climax where, if nothing else, Glass certainly goes for it.  There’s a taste of the Coen Brothers in the misunderstandings and wrong-headed assumptions that lead to murder, but Glass and Tofilska don’t have the clearheadedness of the Coens–they’re fully inside the characters’ obsessions instead of holding any distance.  Kristen Stewart, channeling a 1950s Method Acting aesthetic, is magnetic, and O’Brian keeps up with her while fulfilling the physical requirements of her role.  As with so much else in Love Lies Bleeding, the atmosphere is pungent to the point of self-parody, and it’s not always evident how much cinematographer Ben Fordesman, production designer Katie Hickman, and the sound design team were in on the joke–or if there was one.  Even if the film is ultimately more a curiosity than a triumph, it makes one thrilled to see what Glass will do next.

A DIFFERENT MAN (A24 – TBD):  Genuinely unique.  In Aaron Schimberg’s morality tale, Edward (Sebastian Stan) is determined to become a professional actor despite his facial disfiguration caused by neurofibromatosis.  In all other ways, he lives an insular, hyper-self-conscious life, marked by his sad crush on his pretty neighbor, aspiring playwright Ingrid (Renate Reineve, from The Worst Person In the World).  When Edward has the chance to alter his appearance, he grabs it and starts a new life.  But he can’t fully step away from his old one, and he auditions in his new identity for a play written by Ingrid, playing a role she modeled on her disfigured neighbor Edward.  Things become far more complicated when the production is joined by Oswald (Adam Pearson, an actor who actually does have Edward’s condition).  Notwithstanding his own appearance, Oswald is in all ways the opposite of Edward, and A Different Man details the interplay of outward form and character.  Schimberg’s work is striking but not fully formed–it isn’t clear what’s meant to be obscure or surreal and what’s just fumbled.  Schimberg wrote the role of Oswald–and thus, in a sense, the entire film–specifically for Pearson, with whom he’d worked on an earlier project, and there’s much to ponder about the porousness of the line between depicting a situation and being an example of it.  A Different Man is never less than fascinating, and Stan commits himself fully to a role that requires notes he’s never played on screen before.  (It’s harder to judge the other lead performances, as Ingrid is more a plot necessity than a fully-formed character, and Pearson is apparently playing a variation of himself.)  It’s a compliment to say that one could imagine Charlie Kaufman making a movie about the making of this movie.  A Different Man, if nothing else,will test A24’s ability to market a truly independent film.