In Review: 'Love Lies Bleeding,' 'Ricky Stanicky'

New this week: A hot-blooded noir and a comedy about three arrested development cases and their imaginary friend.

Love Lies Bleeding
Dir. Rose Glass
104 min.

One common pitfall of mediocre neo-noirs are filmmakers who get caught up with signifiers, fiddling too much with hard men and femme fatales, stylized dialogue, and flashy chiaroscuro lighting techniques. Starting with the title, Rose Glass’ Love Lies Bleeding serves as a potent reminder that passion is the true engine of the genre, even as it trades robustly in the familiar archetypes and the nasty little twists that go along with it. Glass pulled off a similar feat with her debut feature, Saint Maud, which scrambles up the high-toned spiritual horror of films like The Exorcist while staking out its own unique psychological terrain. Here she trades in dark family secrets and a scuzzy criminal underworld, on top of Coens-esque black comedy and a distinctly modern sapphic eroticism. The difference here is she means it. 

Set in a dusty Southwest backwater in the late ‘80s, Love Lies Bleeding is about two women whose desire for each other can’t be pursued so easily, not because of the locals looking sideways at their sexuality, but because they’re hung up in compromising situations. It’s well known around town that Lou (Kristen Stewart), the manager at a downscale gym, prefers the company of women, but she tends to keep a low profile, occasionally indulging a persistent admirer named Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov) while stuck in a dead-end life. All that changes when Jackie (Katy O’Brian), a drifter with dreams of being a champion bodybuilder, walks into the gym and immediately ignites her imagination. Jackie needs to earn some cash to make it to Vegas for a competition, so she takes a job waitressing at a gun range owned by Lou’s father (Ed Harris), who runs an unsavory business on the side. 

Other complications follow, like the escalating abuse her older sister (Jena Malone) takes at the hands of her brother-in-law (Dave Franco) and the changes wrought by the steroids Lou keeps slipping to Jackie like Popeye’s cans of spinach. Yet in Glass’ telling—and in the raw chemistry between Stewart and O’Brian—the spark between these two women is undeniably real, even as trust and security follow much more slowly. There are reasons why Lou can’t just leave her crummy life behind, but she can’t share them readily. And she naturally feels a bit of skepticism about Jackie, this exotic stranger who hitchhiked to town one night and wound up crashing in her bed indefinitely the next. One is dead broke, the other is cleaning out bathroom clogs with bare hands. Where can their relationship go? 

This being a grisly crime film, the answer is “nowhere good,” but the authentic heat between the two lovers raises the emotional stakes and gives the action the rippling tautness of Jackie’s hulked-out physique. Glass taps into the essential unease of many noirs since Double Indemnity, where relationships are both lusty and transactional, and it’s not easy for the parties involved to figure out whether they’re being manipulated or not—or even if they can stop themselves regardless. Love Lies Bleeding channels the sly comedy of Blood Simple and other Coens films about wayward crimes of passion, but Glass and her cast, particularly Harris as fearsome patriarch who’s grown out all the hair he has left, leave nothing on the table. The film is willing to follow these characters to the brink and beyond, and when the emotions get extra hot, it can depart from reality altogether. Love can bend the universe. — Scott Tobias

Love Lies Bleeding opens today in limited release.

Ricky Stanicky
Dir. Peter Farrelly
113 min.

Whether due to coincidence or a convergence of cultural forces, imaginary friends have become one of the year’s hottest movie trends. The (not-screened-for-critics) horror movie Imaginary hits theaters today with the John Krasinski comedy IF set to arrive in May. It’s a bit of a stretch to count Ricky Stanicky, a new comedy directed by Peter Farrelly, to fill out the three-makes-a-trend set, but let’s call it close enough. Here said friend, the eponymous Ricky Stanicky, isn’t fanciful so much as strategic, the creation of three lifelong pals looking for a scapegoat for their misdeeds and a catchall reason to do whatever they like while leaving their romantic partners behind. From a Halloween prank gone horribly awry (Ricky’s fault) to a reason to leave a tedious baby shower (Ricky’s cancer has recurred), Ricky has served Dean (Zac Efron), Wes (Jermaine Fowler), and JT (Andrew Santino) well for years. Then the day arrives when the cover story collapses and they have to produce a living, breathing Ricky lest they be found out.

That’s the clever-enough premise driving a never-quite-clever-enough movie with one element that almost redeems it: John Cena. To stand in for Ricky, the overgrown boys turn to Rock Hard Rod (Cena), an Atlantic City entertainer who bills himself as “South Jersey’s Premier X-Rated Rock and Roll Impersonator” and specializes in paying tribute to Devo, Billy Idol, and others while twisting their lyrics to be about masturbation. (“I’m the only one in the world that’s figured it out!,” he says of a specialty he dubs “jizz jams.”) Though an alcoholic of seemingly limited skill, he excels at the part, playing it so well that he decides to keep it up after tricking Wes and Dean’s boss Ted (William H. Macy) into giving him a high-paying job. The film’s too-few laughs belong to Cena but, like his character, he gets the job done by giving it his all, playing Rod/Ricky as a fragile lost soul who’s faked his way into the life he should have been living all along.

Cena’s a three-dimensional element in an otherwise two-dimensional environment. A sort of homecoming for Farrelly after Green Book and The Greatest Beer Run Ever, the film plays like a flatter version of the sort of comedies he used to make with his brother Bobby. (It’s kind of remarkable that it took three decades for one of their movies to include a squirmy bris-gone-wrong scene.) But, Cena aside, little in Ricky Stanicky suggests it began as a hot script set to star, at various points, James Franco, Jim Carrey, or Joaquin Phoenix as it chugs from one belabored scene to the next. There’s no Ricky Stanicky to take the blame for that. —Keith Phipps

Ricky Stanicky is now streaming on Prime Video.