Movies as thoroughly – and earnestly – horny as Love Lies Bleeding don’t get made very often anymore. And much has been written about how they don’t get made very often anymore. I don’t think that director Rose Glass is engaging with discourse here, but she is being openly provocative, condemning the scolds to be voyeurs on the sex lives of fictional characters. This is the most successful part of Love Lies Bleeding, a lesbian erotic thriller with the neon aesthetic of Drive and the morbid humor of the early Coen Brothers. Blood and guts are plentiful, but so are steamy love scenes between the film’s two stars, Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian. O’Brian plays Jackie, a romantic but naive bodybuilder; Stewart plays Lou, a reclusive gym manager who begins providing Jackie with steroids.

Lou is the daughter of a very dangerous local gangster (Ed Harris, game for anything), and the sister of a put-upon wife (Jena Malone) with an abusive husband (Dave Franco). Rounding out the supporting characters is a local girl named Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov) with a very unsubtle crush on Lou that spins into animosity toward Jackie. These supporting characters – all various combinations of violent, stupid, or delusional – play there roles within Lou and Jackie’s orbit, but the film’s script (by Glass and Weronika Tofilska), mostly feels plug-and-play. When a character does something that’s difficult to parse, the explanation is usually that’s just what needed to happen for the film to proceed forward, and the love story, while appropriately titillating, fails to present itself as anything genuinely meaningful.

Glass is an active practitioner of style. Her first film, Saint Maud, was a unique example of religious body horror. In an era where everyone is making their trendy A24-style horror movie, Glass’s debut stood out for its conviction. Love Lies Bleeding doesn’t leave much of an impression outside of its depiction of queer passion. Stewart and O’Brian’s performances work well when they wordlessly express how much they crave each other physically, but the screenplay lets them down when they have to perform anything else with genuine substance. When the film’s third act goes full Cronenberg, the flimsiness of the narrative becomes fully apparent. Bleeding‘s promotion (which is A24) is leaning into the B movie sensuality, a wise move for audience building, but it’s also pushing the film’s most successful trait.

 

Directed by Rose Glass