We all have that one actor and actress who just… doesn’t work for us. For my mom, it’s Julianne Moore. For my dad, it’s Adam Sandler. For me, it’s Kristen Stewart. My distaste for Stewart wasn’t fully apparent to me until I saw the trailer for Love Lies Bleeding, which, as a neo-noir Coen Brothers homage, seems like the kind of movie I should be rushing out to see. But every time the trailer cut to Stewart and her painfully forced gaze of admiration for co-star Katy O’Brien, I remembered how much I disliked Spencer, and began to dread the prospect of spending 100 minutes with perhaps the most overrated actress of her generation again.

I’m not sure that anything will ever convince Stewart is a good actress, but I am happy to report that Love Lies Bleeding is, in fact, a good movie, and one that’s much nastier and gnarlier than its overheated advertising might suggest. Set up as a story of love conquering all, it slowly devolves into a bloody, hallucinatory tale of greed and self-inflicted desperation, the kind of movie where the audience isn’t interested in picking a side so much as taking bets on what depraved thing the characters will do next. The end result is grisly, subversive and, in a strange way, refreshing. 

As one can glean from the trailer I’ve maligned about three times now, Love Lies Bleeding follows Lou (Stewart), the manager/janitor of a gym in a small town in New Mexico in 1989. One day Jackie, an impossibly buff drifter, stops by the gym to workout, and the two lost souls begin sleeping with and then living together. There’s just one problem – Jackie is working as a waitress for Lou’s estranged father, Lou Sr (Ed Harris)., who owns a gun range/restaurant that doubles as a front for his cross-border gun running operation. Even though this increases Lou’s exposure to both her father and J.J. (Dave Franco), her sister Beth’s (Jenna Malone) abusive husband and a middle manager at the range, she puts up with it all to be with Jackie, who’s only taken the job so she can save up to money for the entrance fee of a bodybuilding competition in Las Vegas. 

On paper, these basic ingredients – two queer women finding each other in a small conservative town filled with violent men –  have the makings of a story of same-sex love overcoming the strictures around it and, by extension, making both Lou and Jackie unlikely heroes. Director Rose Glass eggs that interpretation along by not only portraying the men in the town as lunkheaded predators (Jackie gets into a scuffle with a fellow gym patron who sexually harasses her mid-meet-cute with Lou; one of J.J. and Beth’s son wears a rubber Donald Trump mask as he runs around the house), but also by focusing so much on the carnal thrill of their relationship, primarily through a sleek montage that contrasts their amorousness with Lou Sr.’s criminal enterprises. Even the steroids that Lou introduces Jackie to feel like a mere tool for a better future, something that’ll pump Jackie up so much that there’s no way she could possibly lose the Vegas competition. If it weren’t for the film’s burbuling electronic soundtrack, this would feel just like a Bruce Springsteen song about a town full of losers and two girls pulling out of it to win.

But then, it all unravels. I won’t spoil how, exactly, it all unravels, but let’s just say it comes when a shocking act of violence is met with another shocking act of violence, and Lou and Jackie find themselves scrambling to cover their tracks and running afoul of Lou Sr. (who’s also being circled by the FBI) in the process. For a moment, it seems the two protagonists will be able to spin this into a win – to bring justice to a criminal who’s constantly evaded it. But as their mistakes pile up, and as both the law and Lou Sr.’s forces begin closing in, Lou and Jackie begin showing their true colors, grasping for a series of sweaty justifications for their increasingly cutthroat behavior. Like the film’s indictment of its male characters, this idea is not conveyed subtly – hopped up on steroids, Jackie flexes and poses in front of a TV screen airing a news report about the fall of the Berlin Wall, hailing it as a “triumph of the individual.” It’s a message she and Lou take too literally, as nearly everything they do from that point on is designed to satisfy their own ends at the expense of other people they claim to care for. 

Stylistically, Glass aims for an interesting midpoint between the bumbling but brutally violent crime capers of the Coen Brothers and the ominous surrealism of David Lynch. The darkness that the characters in the film have to contend with – personified by the glowering Harris – is very real and present, but they make clear, over and over again, that they simply aren’t up to the task. Even Jackie, who rolls into town with all the confidence of the world, begins to crack under the pressure as she loads up on steroids, which force her to slowly lose her grip on reality and see other people as bug-eyed monsters. Instead of crusading vigilantes, Lou and Jackie end wind up as a more desperate, dour version of Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt in Burn After Reading, convinced they’ve found the perfect way to wriggle out of their many issues when they’re actually digging a larger and larger hole for themselves. 

Love Lies Bleeding’s climax, which dips into the magical realism territory and leaves the viewer wondering how much of what they watched beforehand was meant to be literally true, is bound to be polarizing, and truth be told I’m not entirely sure it worked. But after what’s framed as something as a triumph for Lou and Jackie, the film ends with one final reminder of how far these two people are willing to go to preserve their own happiness, no matter who they end up harming in the process. It’s an ending that smothers the hope out of any viewers who might believe that Lou is better than her father, that she would somehow end the cycle of violence that he’s wrought. Instead, it forces the audience to confront not only what they would be capable of doing to protect what they think they’re entitled to, but what they’re willing to give themselves a pass for, as well. It’s restraint, the ability to act on more than selfish instinct, that makes us human. Loves Lies Bleeding is all about the lies we tell ourselves when that restraint melts away.