Love Lies Bleeding (2024)

Score: 4.5 / 5

Sexy, subversive, violent, unexpectedly funny, and intentionally messy, Love Lies Bleeding is the breath of fresh air queer audiences -- and audiences in general -- have needed from a crime thriller for years. Who knew it would come from Rose Glass in her sophomore feature? Not this viewer, who could never quite shake the feeling that something profound was happening before his eyes in a screening less appreciated by the other viewers. Blending its lesbian romance, absurd criminal thrills, and a constantly evolving plot, the film manages to reinvent itself a few times while never straying from its intense, focused purpose of... well, I suppose that is up to interpretation. And it's got a phenomenal score.

Lou (Kristen Stewart, ballsy and excellent) is living anything but the dream, elbow-deep in a shit-filled toilet in a forgotten shithole town somewhere in the American West desert. She manages a gym, a swole -- forgive me, sole -- source of pride for the tough go-getters in this unforgiving land. Her father Lou Sr. (a wonderfully made-up Ed Harris) is essentially the crime kingpin of the area: owning a gun range allows him some cover as he runs weapons across the southern border. He also disposes of evidence against him, i.e. the remains of his enemies, in a canyon not far from town. And I just realized two things: one, that the setting is probably New Mexico (I may have missed that detail), and two, that Stewart's character was probably meant to be a boy as she is clearly (not verbally) named Lou Jr. That's hilarious and tragic. Anyway, we can assume Lou's history involves working (and "fixing" or "cleaning," as we see her do regularly) for her father in a criminal capacity. She also chain smokes while listening to self-help tapes to assist her cessation. The humor in this film is unexpected and bold while never releasing the at times unbearable tension.

Lou has a strange relationship with women, no doubt due to her lesbian identity and the likelihood that her dead mother is also at the bottom of her father's secret canyon junkyard. She is a close friend to her sister Beth (Jena Malone), who suffers cruelly under the violent hand of her husband JJ (Dave Franco with an unforgivable mullet), trying to encourage her to leave while also supporting and nurturing her as she is willing, even in the hospital. Lou has an on-and-off fling with Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov), whose enamored obsession is more than a little off-putting (in the most delightful way; she's probably my favorite part of the film, for the handful of scenes she graces). So when a hitchhiking gal chasing a dream shows up at Lou's gym, she falls in love hard. It helps that the visitor is a musclebound bodybuilder named Jackie (Katy O'Brian), en route to Las Vegas to compete and realize her life goals. We don't learn as much about Jackie, keeping her past a bit of a cipher, though we meet her having sex with JJ to find a job and fund the rest of her trip; there are also a couple references to Gulliver's Travels, which I think help make the film's surreal ending scene make a lot more sense. It's 1989, and these young women are going to make a better life for themselves, dammit, regardless of how "pretty" they are perceived to be by others or who dares to assert power over them.

The thing about power, though, is its cyclical effect, regardless of your positioning in it, over it, under it, or around it. The power these characters want is only really accessible through violence: guns and muscles. Jackie, clearly physically powerful, and Lou, emotionally and mentally powerful as we learn, get caught in a loop of attempting to assert themselves and escape from a world in which they are constantly objectified or controlled by men. Their romance manifests in wonderfully erotic scenes -- of, let's say, physical activity -- glaringly designed for queer audiences rather than for the straights. Jackie's strength increases each time, due perhaps to Lou's increasing affection as well as their reckless (and mutual) use of steroid shots. As things with JJ and Lou Sr. heat up, we get an impression that a Thelma & Louise flee from town is in their cards, but when a series of shocking acts of violence (partly fueled by misogyny, partly by roid rage) get blood on their hands, the film reinvents itself yet again, suggesting that violence is sometimes not only necessary but morally defendable. 

Embracing a sort of Blood Simple, early Coen brothers flavor, Glass dives headfirst into this lesbian noir drama in a way that forced me to think this is what Drive-Away Dolls could have been if it took itself seriously. A key difference, though, is that Glass pointedly avoids the tropes of that genre: we have no hard-boiled detective or reluctant protagonist, no distinguishable femme fatale, no real intrigue into criminal power structures. Instead, she keeps zigging when we expect zagging, keeping her plot wholly unpredictable as we wait for the next gritty, grimy, gory jolt of energy as the film teeters into surrealism. Perhaps my understanding of this film stems from Glass's previous work, the ethereally brutal Saint Maud, but it read to me as a bit of an indictment of obsession and the terrible costs of pursuing it. In a somewhat wry way, the film is about love, lies, and bleeding, amped up with drugs and roids much like its characters. recreating itself in increasingly shocking ways. From its haunting Cronenbergian or Refn-esque shots of Lou Sr. doused in red spotlight to its Aronofsky-lite bits of body horror as Jackie grows into her bodybuilding ideal, the film comfortably and daringly knows its place in cinematic history while blazing its own uncompromising path.