Love Lies Bleeding puts the Messiness of Love on Full Display in Gnarly Neo-Noir Erotic Thriller

Image courtesy of A24

On Valentine’s Day of this year, I woke up to no less than six messages on Instagram from various people, each one containing Kristen Stewart’s now notorious Rolling Stone magazine cover shot by Collier Schorr. I’m a photographer. I identify as a lesbian. And I’m flattered that Schorr’s bold masculine staging of a female A-list actor wearing a jockstrap and a leather vest made my friends think of me. 

I was mostly unaware of the drama the cover caused throughout the day because, like many other queer people who rarely get to see masculine women treated as objects of desire, I was too busy salivating over it. But as the day went on and the initial euphoria of it all started to wane, it became clear that the image of Kristen Stewart presenting herself outside the boundaries of male consumption had offended the public’s expectation of women’s sexuality. And unfortunately for those who couldn’t handle the sight of a woman putting herself on display for the pleasure of other women, that Rolling Stone cover is just a simmering warm-up compared to the gnarly, visceral queer spectacle of Stewart’s latest film, Love Lies Bleeding.

At the heart of the film is a feverish and destructive love story between Kristen Stewart’s Lou, a boyish and twitchy gym manager stuck cleaning up other people’s bodily messes both at work and home, and Katy O’Brien’s literal strong female character Jackie, an ambitious and wild-eyed bodybuilder hitchhiking her way to Vegas for the national women’s championship. As two isolated misfits in a world that doesn’t quite get them, Lou and Jackie are magnetized to one another and quickly fall into raunchy, obsessive bliss. The honeymoon phase is unfortunately short-lived and it’s not long before Lou’s crimelord-daddy issues collide with Jackie’s steroid-induced psychosis, and the film launches into a nonstop pedal-to-the-metal tale of just how messy love can be.

Viewers get a liberal dose of shameless queer desire as these two form a mutually-intense infatuation. Kristen Stewart licking protein shake off of Katy O’Briens chiseled body and declaring she “wants to stretch her” just to see how much she can take is a far cry from the typical depiction of queer romance as private moments in dark rooms and stolen looks of longing. Director and co-writer Rose Glass makes it clear that this is not the typical “girl-meets-girl in a world that doesn’t acknowledge their love” kind of story. It’s more like “two-hot-freaks-meet-and-get-mixed-up-in-some-crazy-shit.”

Despite the intense pleasure they give one another, their love is nothing to idolize. There’s a toxicity between the two starting from their very first moments alone in the gym when Lou, all puppy-eyed and desperate for attention from someone other than her meth-addled ex, offers Jackie a free unlimited stock of steroids. From that moment on the power is constantly shifting between the two as they work sometimes together, sometimes against one another, to cover up a bloody mess caused by Jackie in a moment of roid rage.

Image courtesy of A24

Half of the film’s characters, like Lou, her older sister and far-too-forgiving abused housewife Beth played by the always stellar Jena Malone, and Daisy, Lou’s shrewd addict ex-girlfriend, feel painfully real in their self-pity and feigned ignorance of how love is keeping them stuck in less-than-desirable circumstances. The other half of the cast, such as Lou Sr., the criminal patriarch with a penchant for bugs and high-fashion mullets, JJ, Beth’s abusive husband and Lou Sr.’s clumsy henchman, and Jackie herself wobble unsteadily on that thin line between fantasy and reality, recalling more cartoonish ‘90s sleaze than devastating portraits of southwestern Americana. 

Love Lies Bleeding ricochets back and forth between raw visceral realism and surreal fever dream mania from scene to scene, sometimes even from moment to moment as various types of love—familial, sexual, romantic, tough, self—beget various types of violence.

Image courtesy of A24

Bouncing boldly between these two approaches could be dangerous in less talented hands, but director Glass straps viewers in for a wild ride where there are no easy answers as to what’s real or imagined. Coming off of her equally insane religious horror debut from 2019, Saint Maud, it’s clear that Glass is unafraid of taking big stylistic swings. In this case, that results in a fresh take on old tropes that doesn’t take itself too seriously. The film splashes around in the psychological thriller and neo-noir genres and, using crafty sound design and trippy visual effects, calls back to some of the most unsettling body-horror moments of films like Black Swan and Requiem For A Dream. Joined by a dark and buzzy synth-laden score by Clint Mansell and some Lynchian neon-soaked cinematography by Ben Fordesman, Love Lies Bleeding is a gutsy exclamation point that doesn’t give a damn what anyone thinks of it. 

Throughout the film, every character has to reckon with the bloody consequences of being in love, but unlike the trashy pulp novels and noir that came before it, Love Lies Bleeding has that rare thing queer cinema doesn’t often get: a happy ending. Sort of.