The new film Love Lies Bleeding (in theaters March 8) looks great. Director Rose Glass casts her New Mexico setting in a grimy light, dinginess cut through with slashes of red. That studied grit is eerily matched by Clint Mansell’s insistent score, all sexy drone and pulse. These rich aesthetics act in service of a hooky, risqué premise: Kristen Stewart plays a gym worker, Lou, who falls in love with a bodybuilder, Jackie (The Mandalorian’s Katy O’Brian), and the two soon find themselves caught up in a gruesome chain of criminal violence. As was true of many of its Sundance brethren this year, Love Lies Bleeding is a riot of vibes.

But, unfortunately, vibes do not a movie make. At least, not unless balanced and textured in just the right way. (Terrence Malick is kind of a vibes guy, after all.) Glass’s film is caught in a frustrating middle place between mood and story. Watching Love Lies Bleeding becomes a trial of patience, as the viewer waits for the plot to rise to meet the film’s good looks, or for those stylish aspects to blossom further into elegant abstraction. Instead, the film hobbles along, revealing ever more contrivances. 

Minus some modern trappings, Love Lies Bleeding is a film we’ve seen many times before. It’s a small-town crime thriller in which one bad thing leads to worse things. Ed Harris’s villain character, a shooting range owner who has some sinister side gigs, seems bought out of a Tarantino catalog. Ditto for a gym groupie, Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov), who would fit right in with the Manson girls of Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood. One half expects to see Michael Madsen walk by in the dusty background, on his way to some quirky monologue. 

There’s nothing wrong with that form, certainly, and it is not unappreciated that Glass is trying to contemporize the genre and to retrain its gaze. Certainly very few of the 1990s films that Love Lies Bleeding is aping (consciously or not) put queerness at the center, let alone with Glass’s graphic ardor. But the cool of the film’s construction stands in poor contrast to the thin formula of its narrative. In a strange way, Love Lives Bleeding might play better if it was more plain; as is, the film stokes anticipation for a true and daring vision that it fails to deliver. 

Stewart and O’Brian are, at least, eminently watchable. It’s fun seeing the former in this particular mode, wary and turned on and laden with secrets. She has an appealing rapport with O’Brian, credibly selling a lust that turns to love. But Glass’s script keeps Jackie mostly opaque. A shadowy past is one thing; no real discernible motivation is another. Jackie’s passion for bodybuilding is certainly clear, but that’s pretty much all we know about the character. It’s increasingly difficult to care about her as she hurdles toward ruin. 

Of course, Glass isn’t exactly going for deep character drama here. Love Lies Bleeding is a spree movie, a rush of sex and violence that is mostly just trying to have a good time. But there isn’t enough muscle in the film to really get things moving. Glass meanders along, staging all the expected scenes, on her way to an absurdist finale that the film hasn’t really earned. At Sundance, there were effusive reactions calling the film shocking and wild, but really there’s little surprise in here; attempts to rattle the squares come off rote and mechanical, as if programmed for post-screening Twitter reactions. Glass’s first film, Saint Maud, was a superior portrait of passion gone amok. That movie ends in fire, while Love Lies Bleeding is too soggy to ever catch flame.