Kristen Stewart's 'Love Lies Bleeding' Is Gonna Kick Your Ass And Make You Beg For More

By Jason Adams | Film | March 10, 2024 |

By Jason Adams | Film | March 10, 2024 |

Bound meets Mandy. Do I even have to write a full review after that? Bound meets Mandy, y’all! What else do you need? If you’ve already watched the trailer for it then you probably already kinda got that vibe, but I’m here to tell you—Love Lies Bleeding sticks the landing, baby. All the heat and noirish airs of the Wachowskis queer 1996 masterpiece shot via the neon psychedelic techno-stylings of Panos Cosmatos’ 2018 flick—what a hot kick in the rock-hard ass this sucker is.

The second film from Saint Maud (and can I get a Fuck Yeah Saint Maud!) director Rose Glass, Love Lies Bleeding stars Kristen Stewart as Lou, a lowly lesbian gym employee—and I might say “lowly” but she is Kristen Stewart and she’s rocking a fuckin’ mullet so you know she’s all kinds of cool even while plunging the nastiest toilet this side of Trainspotting. One fateful day Lou spots across the gym a slab of fierce beefcake named Jackie (Katy O’Brian), a character who triumphantly continues last year’s theme of “chaotic bisexuals” (see Passages and Poor Things, Anatomy of a Fall and Afire, just for starters) and squares it by quads.

Such quads! Such delts! And all of those other words for muscle-groups that I only vaguely understand. Point being Jackie is built like a sultry brick shithouse and she knows it, and O’Brian is so awash in effortless, gleaming charisma that you, me, and be-mulleted Kristen Stewart are all of us together immediately smitten. Although smitten, sounding so close to kitten, makes their meet-cute sound a little too cute—these two can hardly wait to tear one another’s rayon tracksuits off and flex each other unto ecstasy, and we can’t wait to watch it either. Cinema! It’s alive!

Unfortunately for their slammin’ romance, both Jackie and Lou have each got their own sordid histories to contend with—Love Lies Bleeding is kind of like watching two femme-fatales fall for each other and have to navigate that, without a patsy to play in sight. Well that’s not entirely true—Lou’s got a sister named Beth (our beloved Jena Malone) who’s married to an abusive mustachioed dickweed named JJ (Dave Franco at his high-pitched sleaziest), and he’ll fill in the Fred MacMurray role nicely when the time comes for it.

If only he was all the ladies had to contend with, though. Lou’s father Lou Sr. (Ed Harris, looking like a sculpture of Sam Jackson in Jackie Brown built out of cigarette ash) is the local criminal entrepreneur du jour, with his bony ass fingers stuck in every diabolical pie, and JJ side-rules this shitty roost as Lou Sr.’s right-hand man. And while Lou Sr. might side-eye JJ for giving his daughter Beth a weekly dose of black-eye, that’s about the extent of his fatherly concern—he’s got more important meth to cook and firearms to traffic to dollop out too much parental tenderness.

Indeed the relationship between the Lous Sr. and Jr. is basically non-existent—the only thing that’s keeping Lou herself in town working her crap-tastic gym job is to try and keep her sister Beth as safe as possible from the toxic men that she’s been beaten down to brainwashed servitude for. It’s a miserable existence, and so when in struts Jackie, towering like the statue of David in her little short-shorts and sports-bra and her tumble of angel-adjacent curls, well who can blame Lou for getting all kinds of blinded to seeing the danger they’re in until it’s practically too late?

Needless to say the secrets start spilling and the bodies start piling up and a yonic crevasse out in the middle of the desert that proves good for disposing of all kinds of stuff starts seeing all kinds of penetrative action. You add on the fact that Jackie, who’s been thumbing it toward Vegas for her dream bodybuilding competition, has begun (under Lou’s tutelage) juicing, and shit gets popping off real quick. Not just the guns (Lou Sr. runs a shooting range) but the guns as in Jackie’s swelling biceps, which she begins hallucinating (or is she?) going Full Hulk.

And it’s tempting here to use the Cronenbergian term “body horror” to describe how Love Lies Bleeding frame’s Jackie’s beefed-up metamorphosis, except one gets the sense that Glass doesn’t find this transformation altogether horrifying. It reads less Body Horror than it does Body Ecstasy. And that’s a neat trick the director pulled off in Saint Maud too—these women of Glass’ mold their bodies into what they need them to be, horror be damned, and they find the experience transcendent. While the process might be just as violent, where Jeff Goldblum’s Brundlefly had nowhere to go but Hell, Glass’ ladies smash their ways straight into their own little Heavens.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention before finishing this review the performance by Anna Baryshnikov (yes Mikhail’s daughter) as an old side-piece of Lou Jr’s named Daisy, who manages to steal every scene she’s in from characters so large and performers so cool that they have no right having any scenes stolen from them. And yet! She does it! Daisy is the dictionary’s picture of “hot mess” and Baryshnikov is ten and a half hoots in the role—I realize this is the second Jackie Brown reference I’m making here but there’s something of Bridget Fonda’s chaos agent from that movie in Daisy, just way more methed-out. High ass hilarity, that one.

Also demanding a shout-out is the to-die-for score from Aronofsky regular Clint Mansell, which supplies the movie’s thrumming pulse—it’s synthy but not in a cold way; basically it’s music to fuck to. And that’s a good thing since Love Lies Bleeding is here to fuck. And fuck it do!