Rose Glass is on her way towards becoming another Ari Aster: a hot-shot filmmaker in the A24 staple who is great at flashy style, from the hip needle-drops to the impressive camera pirouettes to the obligatory blasts of surrealism. Her first film, the overpraised religious zealot horror picture “Saint Maud,” checked off most of these boxes, and so does her new, equally overrated “Love Lies Bleeding.” What are these movies about? What is Glass’ worldview? What does she feel, apart from fealty to other movies? All that matters is that they are cool. Like Aster, she suggests a karaoke artist.
If “Saint Maud” was a mixtape of Roman Polanski’s “Repulsion” and Brian de Palma’s “Carrie,” “Love Lies Bleeding” is the Coens’ “Blood Simple” and the Wachowskis’ “Bound” by way of Julia Ducournau’s “Titane.” Ducournau is especially instructive in underscoring what Glass lacks as a filmmaker: namely, an authentic voice and feeling for her characters. “Titane” pivots on a premise that’s more bizarre than the one driving “Love Lies Bleeding,” following a woman who’s impregnated by an automobile and goes undercover as a young man only to be mistaken by a firefighter for his son. Ducournau fashions that premise into a parable of distorted body image and a yearning for belonging, which is to say that her ostentatious flourishes emotionally matter.
“Love Lies Bleeding” is set in one of those only-in-the-movies, desiccated western towns that are composed only of the buildings and citizens necessary for moving derivative plots forward. There’s a gym managed by Lou (Kristen Stewart), and there’s a shooting range, owned and operated by Lou’s father, Lou Sr. (Ed Harris). Behind the shooting range is a bottomless canyon convenient for disposing of bodies, and since Lou Sr.’s patriarchal evil is tipped off instantly, we know he’s made good use of it. Lou has a sister, Beth (Jena Malone), who is married to an abusive lout, JJ (Dave Franco), who manages the shooting range with Lou Sr. and helps him in a criminal enterprise that Glass barely even bothers to define. Everyone here is understood to be a prescribed type who’s here for a preordained formulaic reason.
Into this noir table-setting wanders Jackie (Katy O’Brien), a well, jacked loner who is homeless and hustling her way towards a bodybuilding competition in Las Vegas. Lou, adrift among signifiers of male oppression and female repression, falls into an affair with Jackie. There is an inciting incident, and we’re off to the races with twists, bloodshed, and even callbacks to the hallucinatory, 1990s-era thrillers of Oliver Stone.
I love noir and have forgiven even stupider plots than the one that Glass unleashes here, but I resent the way that she holds herself above the material. The synth score, the horror-movie prowling of the camera, the body building, Ed Harris’ cryptic visage, the shooting range — this is all clutter thrown at the screen in an effort to earn this movie praise for its audacity. Even the casting of Jenna Malone is a cliché particular to self-conscious movies, as she played similarly lost weirdos in films such as Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Inherent Vice” and Nicolas Refn’s “The Neon Demon.” Most noirs at least believe in themselves, in their own dream logic, while Glass is aiming for a calling card.
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Slow cinema is a provocation, designed to challenge the rhythm of conventional films, which offer formula plotting at a predictable clip to keep us satiated. For the uninitiated, when I say slow cinema I don’t simply mean a long movie. Many pop films run, for reasons that elude me, up to 3 hours these days, but they aren’t slow in the manner of slow cinema. Boring, sure, they are often that. But they are driven by incidents designed to stimulate the viewer. Slow cinema is not. A film by, say, Tsai Ming-liang, one of the most exacting of the modern slow auteurs, might have a character staring at a wall for 25 minutes. Other modern filmmakers working with slow cinema aesthetics are Pedro Costa, Albert Serra, and Nuri Bilge Ceylan.
In conventional cinema, many scenes are transitional means to an end, which is the resolution of the plot. For slow cinema, the experience of the transition itself is the point. If a man stares at trees pondering his spiritual ennui, a slow-cinema filmmaker will want you to experience that ennui for as long as the protagonist does. In the film prompting this aside, Pham Thien An’s Cannes award-winning “Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell,” we see the hero drive in real time from one village home to another in an unbroken shot that includes two conversations and the drive and runs over 25 minutes.
A potential immediate response to this sort of scene: Why in God’s name doesn’t this movie get to the point? If you wish to push yourself, your next response may be: But why must every movie move the same? Why must a point always be gotten to? What is a point? What am I, in fact? My tongue is partially in my cheek but you catch my drift. The aim is to break down cinematic conventions that gratify short attention spans, making the way for a meditative purity and a new means of telling stories and mining emotions, or even to question the need to organize our lives in terms of stories and emotions to begin with. Slow cinema can make you very defensive. You will be bored, and if you’re trying to fancy yourself an aesthete, you will feel guilty for this boredom. And aesthetes, accomplished, aspiring, and otherwise, are the only people bothering with slow cinema anyway — let’s get real. No one else is going to take the challenge.
Slow-cinema films are always rapturously received by critics, who’re often terrified of the word “boring,” which is why I take such pleasure in using it more often than I probably should. But not all slow cinema productions are created equal. Two slower, consciousness-expanding films placed on my best movies list of last year: Ceylan’s “About Dry Grasses” and David Easteal’s “The Plains.” The latter is particularly indebted to this movement, as its 3-hour running time is composed almost entirely of the drives a man takes to and from work, and over the course of that time the expectations that we take into the theater of a regular movie’s duties melt away as this man’s soul is revealed to us. This is a great film to show skeptics why slow cinema exists.
“Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell” does not have the same effect. The filmmaking is exquisite, as Thien An mounts compositions that suggest the Vietnamese countryside to be a heavenly, transitional realm. But the characters don’t open up to us, and so the film never becomes more than a technical achievement. When slow cinema is just a technical achievement … well, a scene from Arthur Penn’s “Night Moves” used to be famous, in which Gene Hackman says that Eric Rohmer’s films were like watching paint dry. Rohmer’s cinema is a roller coaster on speed next to “Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell.”
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“Late Night with the Devil” is a one-joke movie, and it isn’t a big deal, but it’s carny-huckster cheesiness goes down easy. It’s the cinematic equivalent of listening to horror-themed radio programs from decades earlier, the sorts that used theremins to stand-in for flying saucers and ghosts. The film purports to be the unedited recording of an episode of a 1970s-era talk show in the Johnny Carson mode, only chintzier. Desperate to boost his ratings, the show’s host, Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian), books guests who’re connected to a demonic cult, including a teenage girl who may or may not be possessed.
We’ve been here many times before, though Australian directors Cameron and Colin Cairnes are adept at evoking the production values of old TV, and that unexpected versatility gives “Late Night with the Devil” juice. The punchline is obvious and murky at once, but the ride leading up to it is eerie, tapping into the Satanic panic that fed audiences’ fears in the 1970s, in between rising gas prices, terrorist showdowns, and political embarrassments. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
“Love Lies Bleeding” and “Late Night with the Devil” are now in theaters. “Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell” is now rentable on Amazon.
