Love Lies Bleeding Needs More Than Violence and Grandeur

Rose Glass’s new thriller, starring Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian, is passionate, intimate, and bold — but can rely too much on stylized glimpses of gore. Photo: Anna Kooris/A24

In the gym where much of Rose Glass’s ultraviolent and ultrasexy romantic thriller Love Lies Bleeding takes place, and where the film’s star-crossed lovers Lou (Kristen Stewart) and Jackie (Katy O’Brian) meet, the walls are covered in posters offering pump-it-up platitudes: Pain Is Weakness Leaving the Body, Only Losers Quit, and so on. Later in the picture, we see yet another one: The Body Achieves What the Mind Believes. That last poster could serve as a kind of thesis for the movie itself. Love Lies Bleeding is about two women who are drawn to each other because they’re so different from each other, so much so that at times it feels like one has conjured the other out of thin air, a mind imagining a body with which to escape this dead-end world.

“So where did you appear from?� anxious gym worker Lou asks the gloriously ripped bodybuilder Jackie the night they meet, right after Jackie punches (and is punched by) one of the gym’s meathead regulars. “Oklahoma� is Jackie’s response, but it’s hard at times not to feel like she could be the tense, troubled Lou’s wish-fulfillment fantasy: a colorful, confident fighter in red-striped track shorts who seems unfazed by all the ghastliness surrounding her. After the two women quickly fall for each other and proceed to have tons of sex, they even seem to develop a kind of psychic bond. Indeed, when Lou shoots Jackie up with the steroids she sells to others who frequent the gym, this woman starts to feel even more like Lou’s creation, a vessel into which she could pour all the things she’s never been able to do herself.

The two actresses complement each other, too. Stewart, who in her best work turns anxiety into poetry, has arguably never been more vulnerable, and O’Brian displays a boldness that comes not just from her extraordinary physique but also from an inner innocence she brings to the character. Although we first meet Jackie as she’s having unpleasant sex inside a Camaro with Lou’s bemulleted shithead brother-in-law JJ (Dave Franco) in exchange for a job, and we then see her sleeping beneath a highway overpass, the character nevertheless bounces through each scene with clear-eyed, all-American optimism. Always on the move, she’s on her way to Vegas to compete in a bodybuilding championship. Lou, by contrast, has been stuck in this dead-end border town forever.

That’s partly because she’s unable to escape the influence of her demonic father (a shaman-maned Ed Harris), who owns not just the gym but also the local gun range, and who is clearly involved in all sorts of other shady dealings. Lou also refuses to leave because she’s worried for her sister (Jena Malone), whose marriage to JJ seems to be founded more on punches than on anything resembling love. Guns, bodybuilding, Camaros, Vegas, a sense of purpose in the West — it was quite charming hearing at the post-screening Q&A that Glass had originally planned to set the movie in Scotland before realizing that it needed “the scale of America.�

That sense of scale and grandeur keeps the bleakness at bay. Glass (who broke out with her 2019 debut feature Saint Maud) has made a movie filled with bold colors, bold sounds, and bold violence that unfolds in broad, fable-like strokes. The gym might be in the middle of nowhere, but there’s a vast field of stars in the night sky beyond it. Lou sees visions of her father drenched in Satanic red light, looming over a deep canyon that could easily be a portal into hell. Jackie’s muscles bulge and crack and ripple when she’s provoked, like the Hulk’s. On the radio are reports from the Berlin Wall falling. The promise of freedom rubs itself in Lou’s face constantly. The year is 1989, though not ostentatiously so. Love Lies Bleeding never feels like a period piece; it’s too mythic for that.

The film is at its best when it focuses on Lou and Jackie’s love for each other, with some startlingly intimate scenes, including one in which Lou asks Jackie how she masturbates. (“Do you put your fingers inside when you fuck yourself? Show me.�) Their passion fuels a lot of the characters’ impulsive decisions later in the story. But as things descend into further violence, the film can start to feel one-note. Like some of Nicolas Winding Refn’s later efforts, its later scenes rely a bit too much on shock value and stylized glimpses of gore, which can dull their impact. At the same time, it’s hard not to be compelled by the film’s two protagonists, by Lou’s bottled-up, boiling-over emotions, and the way that Jackie’s power and confidence soon transform into something more unhinged and even a little surreal. What’s that other cliché they say in gyms? Fuck Average, Be Legendary.