Love Lies Bleeding
Directed by Rose Glass
Running time: 1hr44 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE
Katy O’Brian and Kristen Stewart in Love Lies Bleeding
Just as you sometimes very much can judge a book by its cover — despite all advice to the contrary — the same can go for films and their posters. If you’ve been near a cinema in the last few weeks, you’ve probably been arrested by the image of Kristen Stewart, in a ratty workout vest and rattier mullet, beside cop-turned-martial-artist-turned-actor Katy O’Brian, packing a revolver and a straining pair of hotpants, all in the service of selling Rose Glass’ delirious second feature Love Lies Bleeding. The colors are garishly saturated. The stars’ expressions are both come-hither and don’t-give-a-fuck-if-you-do. That fantastic alliterative title enters your brain like a mantra. It all promises something lurid and sweat-licked and dirty-hot and bothered. Glass keeps that promise and then some.
Glass’ impressive debut, Saint Maud, was a patient, nervy art-horror tease that saved its fireworks for a whopping jolt of an ending. Dispensing entirely with British reserve and good manners for her follow-up, Glass turns the dial all the way up from the very beginning of Love Lies Bleeding, embracing red-blooded American pulp sensibilities for a seamy Sapphic mix of revenge thriller, outsider romance and bodily-fixated fantasy. Most films that go this hard this fast run out of gas; this one somehow keeps finding a new maximum volume, a new shot of energy, from scene to scene, stretching the bounds of gravity and reality if that’s what it takes.
Our pulses duly quicken when Lou (Stewart), a taciturn manager at a skeezy gym in 1980s New Mexico, first locks eyes with homeless amateur bodybuilder Jackie (O’Brian) across the weights section. Their immediate lust is practically audible over the blaring synthetic soundtrack of the gym and the strenuous, territorial grunting of its male clientele: in no time at all, Love Lies Bleeding gives you a barrelling sense of an attraction fatal only to those who might get in its way. That’s an inconvenient development for Lou’s grotesque family of redneck criminals, lorded over by her estranged father and namesake Lou Sr. — skin-crawlingly played by Ed Harris, sporting an all-timer in the cinematic ranks of roadkill wigs. He and his repulsive, wife-battering son-in-law J.J. (Dave Franco) are both given to hair-trigger acts of extreme violence. But so, it turns out, is Jackie, especially under the influence of the steroids that Lou pushes on her.
The ensuing showdown is that rare combination of stomach-rearranging grisliness and bristling erotic charge: bodies fall, bodies fester, bodies rise, bodies grow and bodies merge. Glass ogles them in all states, with uniformly rapt delight, while her leads appear transformed under each other’s respective gazes. It’s a thrill to see Stewart, often such a deftly contained performer, letting it all hang out, giving sinewy physical definition to Lou’s desperate isolation and panting desire, and owning her own queerness on screen in the process. O’Brian, meanwhile, is as volatile and unpredictable as her character; together, the women have a fused, bigger-than-the-body chemistry that propels Love Lies Bleeding into a realm of the poetic and the ethereally absurd, at no cost to the dirt and dried blood under its fingernails.
LOVE LIES BLEEDING (2024) Written by Rose Glass and Weronika Tofilska | Shot by Ben Fordesman | Edited by Mark Towns