Review: Love Lies Bleeding (2024)

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A blood-soaked, desert-set neo-noir about a lesbian romance that detours into body horror. There’s a lot going on in Love Lies Bleeding, the latest work from Rose Glass, director of the impressive psychological horror movie, Saint Maud (2020). Not everything about the movie’s go-for-broke attitude and grab-bag approach to genre works, but the performances do to an impressive degree.

The film stars Kristen Stewart as Lou, a sad-sack woman living in New Mexico, who works a modest job as a gym manager to stay away from the family business run by her gangster dad played by Ed Harris (sporting a truly deranged blond skullet). One day, a buff bodybuilding drifter, Jackie (Katy O’Brian), comes into her gym and Lou is smitten. The two strike up a romance, but as Lou helps Jackie swell out with steroids pilfered from her dad’s supply, the two get tangled up with Lou’s abusive brother-in-law (Dave Franco), who happens to be her dad’s Number Two. Things go from bad to worse as characters make one bad decision after another, which is par for the course in any noir-tinged work.

Stewart is a visual performer, through and through, conveying her emotions through ticks and looks and whether she bites her lips or lets a furtive smirk sneak through. Her face is the movie’s not-so-secret weapon, because simply watching her face is fascinating, as if she cannot help but let all the emotions swirling through her head show on her face in utterly credible ways. For instance, the moment Lou spots Jackie, we can tell she’s head over heels, and it’s fascinating to watch Lou’s relationship with Jackie grow from infatuation to obsession and finally to something akin to partnership almost entirely through the way that Stewart looks at her.

Of course, we don’t just watch Lou. We watch Lou watching Jackie, and Glass’s camera views Jackie through Lou’s eyes. The movie positively gushes over O’Brian’s ripped physique, with long, lusty shots of her toned muscles and chiseled jawline. In slow motion, we see Lou watching, licking her lips, and then extreme slow-motion shots of sweat dripping from Jackie’s clavicle or the veins on her biceps bulging. It’s erotic, but also obsessive, slightly unnerving, which is the point. Lou’s obsession with Jackie is dangerous, as is Jackie’s obsession with her own strength, which drives her to more desperate ends to fuel her bulking.

As an aside, it’s funny to note that sexualized imagery of women (albeit masculine women in this case) is alive and well in Hollywood movies, but only in queer films, as if the lesbian perspective absolves the camera of any untoward lust. Love Lies Bleeding indulges in so many intense sex scenes that delight in O’Brian’s body, lusting like nobody’s business, that you laugh at the producers knowing they could get away with all the goofy, De Palma-esque flesh fantasizing because there were two women in love at the film’s centre.

The intensity of the film’s romantic scenes prepare us for the film’s other bodily fixation: blood and gore. Once blood starts being shed (it’s right in the title, so don’t act surprised), Glass fixates on the brutality of bones cracking and flesh ripping. It’s horrifically violent in moments, and gets more grotesque as it moves towards its climax, when it briefly transforms into a body horror freakout. The film’s gory trajectory isn’t unexpected—if you’ve ever watched a David Cronenberg film, you know that explicit sex often precedes explicit violence. But there are a few moments, including the bonkers ending, where you sit back and wonder for a second: wait, this is where that romance was headed? For a movie that is so credible in the performances and the style, which I’ll touch on in a second, the narrative can sometimes make you roll your eyes. Perhaps this is pro-forma for many neo-noirs; not everything is as clockwork as Blood Simple (one of the film’s other big influences).

Speaking of the film’s style, it retains elements of the A24 house style, such as the soft focus and close-up heavy visual approach. But the camera’s relationship to the characters is clear and consistent and I appreciate the use of the anamorphic frame and the color grade that emphasizes the orange to pink hue of desert twilight. It’s a pretty movie, except in the moments when it’s being deliberately ugly.

The thing that holds me back from greater praise for Love Lies Bleeding has to be that all the disparate elements never fully cohere. The neo-noir plotting of compounding bad choices, the white trash Coen Brothers-esque supporting cast and desert community goofery, the Cronenbergian fleshiness, are all considered, but not entirely consistent. As a result, the movie lives and dies with the performances, which are good, thankfully. As a vehicle for Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian, this is compelling; as a genre exercise, it’s intriguing, but somewhat adrift, a grab bag of references in an era where vibes do most of the heavy lifting.

6 out of 10

Love Lies Bleeding (2024, USA)

Directed by Rose Glass; written by Rose Glass and Weronika Tofilska; starring Kristen Stewart, Katy O’Brian, Jena Malone, Anna Baryshnikov, Dave Franco, Ed Harris.

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