Love Lies Bleeding

In 2019 Rose Glass directed Saint Maud, a film in which a young woman's religious hysteria and self-righteousness end up consuming her. Saint Maud was a film based firmly in reality but with specific scenes and moments where the line between reality and fantasy blurred. 

Glass's sophomore effort, Love Lies Bleeding, is similar. The movie is realistic right down the shitty, constantly overflowing toilets at the grubby gym the main character, Lou, manages. And yet the film has moments of body horror and fantasy that break out of the otherwise gross and dingy realism--just like Lou and her love interest, Jackie, want to break out of the confining, dead end realities they currently inhabit.

Love Lies Bleeding is a lot of things: it's a pulpy, erotic, queer neo-noir. It's a rollercoaster of shock and outrageousness. It's gross. It's sexy. It's funny. It's wild. It's tonally all over the damn place. Glass takes inspiration from David Lynch, the Coen brothers, and Thelma and Louise (one of the characters is even named Louise!). I do wish the film was a tad more centered and less all over the place, but I don't hate that it's messy. It's got heart and it's raw and authentic, even in the moments where it becomes pure fantasy.

Kristin Stewart plays Lou, an openly lesbian gym manager living in nowheresville New Mexico. She doesn't speak to her father, Lou Sr. (Ed Harris), the owner of a gun range who is also involved in gun-smuggling across the border. She begrudgingly watches over her older sister, Beth (Jena Malone), who is regularly beaten by her husband, J.J. (Dave Franco, with just the grossest little rat-tailed mullet I've ever seen), yet refuses to leave her or press charges. 

Lou's life stinks as much as the poopy toilets at the gym...until Jackie (Katy O'Brian) walks into her gym and into her heart (and bed) one day. Jackie is hitchhiking around the southwest with the goal of making it to Las Vegas for a women's body-building competition. She ends up in Lou's little town and the two women have immediate chemistry. They also have chemicals...steroids, specifically. Lou doesn't use them, but she has a ton of them that she illegally acquired at her gym and gives them to Jackie, who quickly becomes addicted to the 'roids. 

I'm going to go into plot spoilers below, so I'll just say that if you want to go into the movie blind be aware that there is a lot of visual imagery that could be uncomfortable: lots of needles (the steroids), violence, and even stuff like vomit and gross bugs pop up quite often in Love Lies Bleeding. Like I said, it's raw. But if you're looking for a trashy, pulpy, queer crime drama that doesn't take itself too seriously, Love Lies Bleeding is your movie.

Spoilers below

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The action really kicks off after J.J. gives Beth a beating that leaves her hospitalized. Jackie, all hepped up on 'roids sees Lou's anguish at her sister's situation and makes...well, a bad decision. She goes to J.J.'s house and when he comes home, she kills him. She takes his head and smashes it against a table until his jaw falls off and, yes, we see the aftermath. During this scene, Jackie appears to be so tall that she grazes J.J.'s ceiling. I gotta admit, I liked seeing a big, strong, tall woman violently kill an abusive man. 

This first (yes, first) murder sets off a chain reaction of events that lead to more and more violence and roid rage. Lou hatches a plan to dispose of J.J.'s body in a location that will lead the police to many other dead bodies...that her dad is responsible for. However, Lou's dad is a dangerous man and he immediately knows that Lou is involved. Plus, there's a witness: a girl, Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov), who has a crush on Lou, sees Lou and Jackie leaving town the night of the murder. And Daisy isn't as dumb as she looks.

The walls begin closing in on Lou and Jackie, even as Jackie insists on getting to Vegas to compete. Lou is basically left to clean up all the messes that Jackie makes along the way...yet remains deeply in love with her. This isn't a couple to emulate.

My only criticism of Love Lies Bleeding is that it kind of goes off the rails in the last 30 minutes or so. A bunch of shit goes down in such quick succession that I felt whiplashed. Also, the characters stopped behaving in ways that would make sense given what we know about them. For example, Lou's dad kidnaps Jackie, but when Lou threatens her dad with blackmail, he just...leaves Jackie tied up in a sports equipment shed on the his tennis court. Like, this man is a killer and he doesn't kill Jackie when it would make complete sense for his character to do so. It's a film where there is a ton of violence, yet the main characters never seem in danger of actually being killed, which just doesn't square with me.

Despite the movie going bananas at the end, I really enjoyed Love Lies Bleeding. It's a really fun, gritty, gross movie that I think I will enjoy watching again.

Grade: B+