Director Rose Glass’s follow-up to Saint Maud—a dreary and daunting “serious horror” that brought Morfydd Clark to the attention of the suits behind The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power—appears on the surface to stray from the genre in which Glass debuted. Yet Love Lies Bleeding is, in actuality, a far more effective horror film than Saint Maud. Glass excels at crafting horrific images, moments of pure grotesquery and terror, and she pushes the boundaries of an otherwise grounded thriller-crime drama into something that resembles a gorgeous night terror. Sensuality oozes from every frame for a film that isn’t even terribly gratuitous (at least, in this desensitized critic’s opinion) during its sex scenes. But the physical act of sex between bodybuilder Jackie (Katy O’Brian) and gym manager Lou (Kristen Stewart) equals otherwise non-sexual scenes, such as Lou jabbing a syringe into Jackie’s butt cheek, or Lou Sr. (Ed Harris) whispering in Jackie’s ear before she fires a gun—or even Jackie’s roid rage-fueled murder of JJ (Dave Franco), which plunges Jackie and Lou’s passionate neophyte romance into an explicitly gay Thelma and Louise, where the two lovers must flee the wrath of Lou’s criminal family.
Set in the 1980s, Jackie and Lou first converge in a twisted sort of meet-cute, where a man’s subtle threat of sexual violence against Jackie dovetails into a crack at Lou’s sexuality and a requited punch in Jackie’s face after she casts the first stone. Jackie is a homeless drifter en route to a bodybuilding convention in Las Vegas, and she makes a prolonged pit stop in New Mexico to work on her physique while she works for Lou Sr. at the shooting range he owns. Back in the gym (which Lou Sr. also owns) to ice Jackie’s busted nose, Lou eagerly offers her, free of charge, some of the steroids that the guys at the gym have shipped there in bulk. Just a little bit, just to see how it feels, she insists to Jackie. From the moment the needle pierces the skin of Jackie’s ass, it’s more like Jackie was shot full of love than of steroids—as corny as that sounds. The connection between the two women is desperate, carnal and overwhelming, if simultaneously toxic and even a little superficial. Suddenly, nothing matters to Lou quite as much as her ripped new girlfriend, whom she’s more than happy to continue supplying with body-enhancing drugs that cause Monstar-like eruptions under her skin in sequences of heightened surrealism.
Nothing else matters, that is, until Jackie’s drug-induced fury ignites bloodthirsty wrath against JJ, the man Jackie is seen fucking at the start of the film in order to secure her place at the gun range. JJ is married to Lou’s sister Beth (Jena Malone) and beats her so badly after the four of them have dinner one night that he lands Beth in the hospital, unconscious with half of her face excruciatingly distended (major props to the makeup department here). Lou wants revenge despite how “brainwashed” JJ has made her sister, but Lou Sr. insists that an eye for an eye isn’t the way to get Beth out of this violent relationship. Nevertheless, fueled by substance abuse, Jackie takes it upon herself to enact revenge on behalf of Lou, breaking into JJ and Beth’s home and ramming the former’s head into the living room coffee table until his jaw cleaves, his face left a gnarled mess of blood and bone. Through her shocked paralysis, Lou knows what to do with the body; she’s buried bodies before. She and Jackie cart JJ’s corpse and his car off to a steep quarry filled with the skeletons of other poor souls who happened to cross Lou’s father. The hope is that the smoke from JJ’s vehicle, which Lou set alight with a Molotov cocktail, attracts cops who will discover evidence which solely incriminates a more pressing suspect.
Easier said than done, between Jackie’s progressing mania and Lou Sr.’s ruthlessness not limited to those outside his own family. And then there’s the issue of a lone witness, Daisy, an eager young lesbian with an off-putting fixation on Lou. Daisy is played to unsettling effect by Anna Baryshnikov, who chews the scenery by the mouthful with her tar-stained chompers; it’s a performance that admirably induces enough second-hand embarrassment to tranquilize a horse.
As the walls close in on Jackie and Lou, Glass amps up the tension with tight, suffocating shots, propulsive editing and an absorbing score by Clint Mansell. At the center of it all is Jackie and Lou’s cacophonous romance, founded from the start on a foundation of Lou’s enabling and Jackie having an affair with Lou’s abusive brother-in-law. By all accounts, the gay Romeo and Juliet were doomed from the start. But in an irritatingly wish-fulfilling way, the film climaxes by building the fantasy sequences into one final, gigantic metaphor that’s too cloying to work in tandem with the nitty-gritty of the previous three-quarters. It comes off a bit like a gargantuan band-aid meant to avoid more tactfully confronting the film’s sensitive themes.
Still, Stewart and O’Brian—the latter a martial artist-turned-actress, with credits in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and the upcoming Twisters—have incredible chemistry, and Stewart’s understated naturalism really shines. Stewart has always had a knack for tense, nervous mumbling, but she’s just as convincing in moments of devastating emotion despite not straying too far outside her range. Stewart isn’t a terribly expressive actor, but her restraint is her superpower. She’s best embodying characters who are holding something back, and you can feel the way Lou strains in moments where her rage seems to have nowhere to go. It makes sense, then, how she’s been forced herself to suppress the crimes she committed with her father as a survival tactic—her father, I should add, played by Ed Harris in perhaps the greatest wig of all time, a wispy, long-haired mullet that adds a dimension of unavoidable humor to this otherwise menacing character.
In spite of a too-neatly packaged conclusion, Love Lies Bleeding is easily one of the best of 2024 so far: A thorny, thrilling narrative about two fucked-up women that is—most importantly—genuinely, scintillatingly hot. The film is also very obviously about the myriad, terrifying ways human beings express love to one another, and on the surface seems to question which ones are more or less valid. When Beth finds out about what Lou and Jackie did to JJ, she erupts in a ferocious rage despite her husband nearly killing her. She accuses her younger sister of not knowing what love is, and Lou calls her a moron in return. One could say that no character in the film actually knows what love is; JJ’s abusive love towards Beth, Daisy’s lustful obsession with Lou, Lou Sr.’s exploitation of his own daughter, Lou and Jackie’s unhealthy, fanatical enabling of one another.
But the ultimate, simple thesis of Love Lies Bleeding is embedded within its form from the very beginning. At the onset of the film, you are plunged into a world of all-encompassing sound. The horrific squelch of a blocked toilet, the slurp of a milkshake into a mouth guarded by browned nubs, the crack and squish of teeth biting into the hard shell of a beetle; the fantastical crunch of veins bulging beneath skin after a shot of steroids, the crack of a head against a glass table until it breaks open like an egg. The tactile world Glass has crafted is just as immersive and erotic in its design as it is physically between her two lead lovers. The first time we see Lou, she’s almost elbow-deep in a women’s room toilet practically overflowing with filthy red-brown sludge. It’s a world that overwhelms the senses, like how love overwhelms good sense.
Director: Rose Glass
Writer: Rose Glass, Weronika Tofilska
Starring: Kristen Stewart, Katy O’Brian, Jena Malone, Anna Baryshnikov, Dave Franco, Ed Harris
Release Date: March 8, 2024
Brianna Zigler is an entertainment writer based in middle-of-nowhere Massachusetts. Her work has appeared at Little White Lies, Film School Rejects, Thrillist, Bright Wall/Dark Room and more, and she writes a bi-monthly newsletter called That’s Weird. You can follow her on Twitter, where she likes to engage in stimulating discussions on films like Movie 43, Clifford, and Watchmen.