Love Lies Bleeding is the kind of weird little film they don’t make anymore. Vile, bombastic, and slicked with sweat, this turbo-charged lesbian crime thriller is the second offering from director Rose Glass, who broke out with the 2019 indie horror Saint Maud. That film proved her unafraid to make you wrinkle your nose in disgust, a boldness that is put to good use in this steroid-popping, hyper-violent love story.
It’s set in a skid-mark corner of 1989 New Mexico and opens, appropriately enough, with one of our protagonists – the brooding gym attendant Lou (Kristen Stewart) – unblocking a clogged toilet. You can always rely on Kristen Stewart to throw you a curveball; her most recent roles include a haunted Princess Diana in Spencer, a bureaucrat who’s turned on by gruesome surgeries in Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future, and now a chain-smoking, beer-swigging lesbian.
When Jackie, a mysterious young itinerant with a gleamingly muscular figure starts working at the same grimly appointed gym on her way to Vegas for a bodybuilding competition, the attraction is instant as Lou watches with secret yearning as Jackie lifts her weights and her biceps ripple.
Jackie – played by the excellent newcomer Katy O’Brien – needs a place to stay. Soon, she is drawn into Lou’s complicated personal life. Her father is a local criminal patriarch (Ed Harris, positively demonic) and her sister (a thoroughly convincing, lovelorn Jena Malone) is suffering domestic abuse at the hands of her obnoxious husband (a grinning, detestable Dave Franco). When a drug-induced urge for revenge goes awry, Lou and Jackie work together – chaotically – to protect themselves from further retribution.
As they try to protect each other from harm – and the prying eyes of Lou’s former squeeze, the irritating Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov) – Lou and Jackie’s infatuation with one another explodes into unhinged amour fou. The film adds fantastical touches to its neo-noir plotting, but it’s the unhealthy and desperately horny lesbian affair at its centre that lures you in.
Glass films with a sort of sleazy hyperrealism, with an eye for both grotesque pops of violence and Cronenbergian body horror (the sound design of Jackie’s expanding, creatine-augmented muscles, which the film imagines growing Popeye-style, is hard to shake). But even with its horror elements, you can’t help but root for these two women who have found a rare bubble of understanding.
If Jackie, who behaves erratically and violently, were a man, Love Lies Bleeding might easily be castigated as a film that was in thrall to toxic masculinity. But Jackie is a rare example of toxic femininity, asking us how we view power, gender, and violence. And still, the film does all this without ever once pausing to twiddle its thumbs. It’s too busy pouring kerosene on the evidence and lighting a match.