It’s been 15 years since the sweet, shaggy slacker romcom Adventureland played at the Sundance film festival – and if that may seem a mere blink of an eye to the small but ardent cult of millennial filmgoers who took the film intensely to heart, its two stars returned earlier this month to the snowy mountains of Utah to remind everyone just how long it’s been. With four films premiering between them, actors Kristen Stewart and Jesse Eisenberg were separately the talk of this year’s festival: at the opening ceremony he presented her, at the grand old age of 33, with the festival’s career-achievement Visionary award.
If it seems a bit premature to be handing gold watch prizes to Stewart, she made some sense of the award’s name by heading up the most gobsmacking vision of the Sundance lineup. The much-anticipated second feature from British writer-director Rose Glass, Love Lies Bleeding is a big, bruising, red-meat fever dream of a film, awash in the lurid 80s Americana of mullets and muscle trucks.
