I think director Rose Glass has created a new subgenre with Love lies bleeding (Now streaming on Max): Queer noir. Glass’ horror adventure Saint Maud It was an effective and often incredibly good feature debut, and his sophomore effort ups the ante with a beefier budget and a cast that includes an inspired Kristen Stewart, a completely bonkers Ed Harris, and a standout performance from Katy O’Brian (who we saw in small roles in The Mandalorian and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania). From the start, the film reeks of style, sweat and ultraviolence, and we, of course, are always up for that sort of thing.
LOVE LIES BLEEDINGSTREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The essence: We meet Lou (Stewart) as she’s shoving her fist into the toilet. No, seriously. There’s something stuck in there, and she’s in it up past her elbow. We can’t see it for sure, but I think it’s a feminine hygiene product, because the water is all bloody. And her co-worker Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov) seems very interested. Wide-eyed. Excited. She’s practically on top of Lou in the bathroom at Crater Gym, a name that tells us this story is set in a place once turned into a wasteland by a meteorite. Anyway. Lou is a sullen, pragmatic misanthrope, and Daisy is just too… needyYuck! Lou lies that he can’t go out tonight, locks the door and goes home to his cat, dinner in front of the TV, beer, the quit smoking tape and a masturbation session on the dirty old couch. It’s 1989. Damn! Wow! Is it 1989? And she smokes anyway. Useless, stupid self-help nonsense.
Next we meet Jackie (O’Brian) in the back of a car with a greasy mustache snarling on her back. The mustache is JJ (Dave Franco), who is getting a piece of Jackie in exchange for getting him a job at the Louville shooting range. It’s probably not worth noting that JJ has a haircut that looks like four or five rat tails lined up at said shooting range for an execution, but I noted it anyway. She sleeps under the overpass and he goes home to his wife and kids and the next day she starts doing whatever, this and that, at the shooting range, owned by Lou Sr. (Harris), who has what can only be described as the skullets’ nuclear warhead. It’s just majestic, beyond acceptable. Yes, Lou Sr. is Lou’s father, and JJ is married to his other daughter, Beth (Jena Malone), who is always battered and bruised, and I’m pretty sure she didn’t walk into a doorknob or fall down the stairs.
You’ll notice that Jackie is cut. Veins and tendons bulging everywhere. She pulls and squeezes in the Crater Gym and Lou stares at her for a long time. Jackie feels it. How could she not? Some horny airhead accosts them in the parking lot and ends up with a broken nose. They retreat to the gym and Lou learns that Jackie is headed to Vegas for a bodybuilding competition. Lou asks Jackie if she wants steroids and Jackie says yes and Lou sucks up the liquid with the syringe. “Where do you want it?” Lou asks and Jackie says “In your ass.” Then they start making out and before long it’s time to eat, baby.
There’s news. The FBI is snooping around asking about Lou’s mother, whom he hasn’t seen in a dozen years. Lou Sr. has a huge house and a creepy bug collection and appears to be some kind of crook who smuggles guns across the Mexican border. Jackie stays and does her bodybuilding poses in the living room while Lou turns into goo. Before long, Lou is making Jackie omelets without the egg yolks because that’s the fatty part. The whites have all the protein, man. She’s still providing the steroids, too. One day, Lou gets a call and learns that JJ has admitted her beloved sister Beth to the hospital this time, all swollen and in a coma. “This guy,” she says, choking on rage, “I want to… I want to do it so bad.” Jackie gets in the truck and drives to JJ’s house and literally transforms into the Hulk and turns his face into tapioca. He stands up and practically bangs his head on the roof. Oops. Too many steroids.
What movies will it remind you of? Love lies bleeding – An amazing title, by the way – it’s like Thelma and Louise If only the Coen brothers had directed it and made it gay as hell, and indulged in some light David Lynchism. (It would make a perfect double feature with the Ethan Coen one.) Dolls to take in the carin fact.)
Performance worth watching: It really does feel like the beginning of O’Brian’s movie star career. He has real charisma, depth and presence.
Memorable dialogue: Jackie: “Never fall in love, okay? It hurts too much.”
Sex and skin: Oh, God. Inside, outside, inside out.
Our opinion: Love has rarely seemed so hopeful and hopeless at the same time as in Love lies bleedingOne of the side effects of steroid use is an enlarged heart, an invisible symbolism that shouldn’t go unnoticed in Glass’s wildly disgusting, beautifully violent, sublimely tender romance about two tough women with absolutely nowhere to go in the goddamn year of 1989. Jackie has big dreams of winning the competition and moving with Lou to the beach in California and getting a job as a trainer so they can live their lives in happiness, and it’s a dream covered in dirty neon and dust, all visual grime and kitsch of the era, and you get the feeling it’s never going to happen. The film is involving and funny, coming close to the abyss of disgust, peering over the edge, and knocking over a chunk of solid wood without actually jumping in. And the key performances are pitch-perfect, especially Stewart’s, who leans into the prickly eccentricities of a woman who’s long been unable to dig herself out of the quicksand of depression.
Is the film about anything other than its own tone and style and glorious deference to B-movies of the past? It doesn’t have to be. But it is, and it’s a sly, intelligent depiction of a desperate, desperate romance, set against the backdrop of the stifling state of LGBTIQ circa 1989, without the egregious political overtones of many well-intentioned modern films (a trend that is, thankfully, starting to wane). That anxiety and desperation bubbles beneath the surface as Glass puts his pockmarked protagonists in a convertible down the gravel road to hell and stomps on the accelerator, indulging in moments of putrid surrealism and hallucinatory violence, ultimately pushing the plot to the frayed edges of sanity. And of course, the ending is really super fucked up. I loved it.
Our calling: ROID FURY!!!!!!! TRANSMIT IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
