Love Lies Bleeding

dir: Rose Glass

2024

It’s..a lot.

This director’s previous film, Saint Maud was a whole hell of a lot as well, but that was a queasy, intimate, horrific character study about a very troubled young woman (brilliantly played by Morfydd Clark who went from that to playing a ‘young’ Galadriel in The Rings of Power). This is…what this is.

It’s set in the 1980s? It has the trappings, the energy, the aggression of flicks that I can’t even think of, but it’s filtered through a sensibility that is completely unlike whatever flicks we might think of from the era?

I am phrasing all of my statements as questions, because I’m unsure of a lot except for my reactions to the flick. I understand my more visceral reactions to the flick, but I’m not entirely across my intellectual reactions to much of what ensues, or many of the themes that crop up.

And there are some elements, like a bonkers scene of Ed Harris eating a giant beetle, that I have no idea what to do with, at all.

This isn’t a cool crime caper, though it has the trappings of such. This isn’t a Tarantino-esque flick with witty dialogue, obscure facts no-one asked for and eruptions of apocalyptic violence. But this is also an overtly sexual, queer forward flick that disdains the often quoted “male gaze” to replace it with something special, but somehow no less vicious.

This is not a flick intended for mass audiences, maybe, but it’s also swinging for the fences in a wild manner that seems like it could be trying to cover almost everything possible and every genre imaginable.

If there was something cinema / the ‘culture’ was obsessed with in the 80s, it was aerobic fitness, with the accompanying gear, and musclebound hulks like Arnie and Stallone ruling the cinematic roost. This flick imposes the same conceptual aesthetic, but it’s in the service of its two main characters / heroines / villains?

You could make the mistake of thinking because Kristen Stewart is quite famous, that she must be the main character here. I am not sure that she is. I think the strong case can be made that Katy O’Brian plays either the main character or the co-lead. If Thelma and Louise is a touchstone, well, that flick clearly had co-leads.

Stewart plays Lou, someone who lives in this shitty town in New Mexico, first shown unclogging a toilet with her arm. She is trapped in this town, because she has a sister she loves in an abusive relationship (Jena Malone, who I love, but who’s wasted in a limited role), and their father is the local kingpin (Ed Harris, even more unhinged than usual, looking like the fucking Cryptkeeper from Creepshow).

Jackie (O’Brian) blows into town, a supremely confident bodybuilder who’s on her way to Vegas for a competition. She’s probably on the run from something or someone. She does not care. Though she has no money.

She fucks a repulsive mulleted guy (Dave Franco) in order to get a job as a waitress at a local gun range, but soon runs into Lou at the gym that Lou manages, and within minutes of meeting each other they’re abusing anabolic steroids and having vigorous sex as well.

Here’s where the problems start: the mulleted guy is the vile abuser that is married to and keeps abusing Lou’s sister Libby. The repulsive mulleted guy works for Lou and Libby’s dad, the kingpin. Lou, for all her practicality and her ability to deal with shit both literal and metaphorical has never been able to free herself from her family’s tentacles, despite her loathing for her dad.

Jackie, who is already fearsome and powerful as the story begins, through Lou becomes even more fierce and dangerous, and, let’s be honest, psychotic through roid rage, and manages to beat mulleted guy to death. To absolute death. She destroys much of his face / head in the depths of her rage. It is, of course, horrific, as anything so horrific should be (done with digital effects, which are clunky but still horrific).

From here the flick becomes a cat and mouse game where Lou isn’t exactly trying to hide what’s happened, because she wants it to undo her dad and his empire by revealing the depths of his crimes, but we also have Jackie turn into a complete chaos agent, who will only kill more people and lash out at the person she ‘loves’ for the purposes of this story.

Lou cleans up multiple crime scenes, rarely being the one who harms people, but quietly being the one trying to alter the narrative with her superior cleaning / crime hiding skills. She’s really very good, very meticulous.

We know how a story like this eventually goes, with more deaths, more narrow escapes, with more questions as to whether our lesbian heroes are going to triumph over the shitty people arrayed against them. But…Jackie is psychotic! She kills, and keeps taking more steroids, which enrages her further. She’ll kill everyone if she’s not stopped!

People have been asking for ages, along the lines of “when will the Messiah return?”, they’ve been asking themselves and each other“who will be the next Arnie?”

I think we have our answer. It should it, it must be Katy O’Brian. She is magnificent, and a much better actor to boot.

There is no less body horror in this flick than Saint Maud, in fact it’s amped up, with disturbing imagery of what changes are represented both within and without Jackie’s body, which definitely crosses the line into (surreal, I don’t think literal) She-Hulk territory, and some genuinely gross hallucinations on her part, including one scene, when Jackie actually gets to the competition in Vegas and performs on stage, that shows the director clearly watched that flick Men that came out a couple of years ago, including its birth mania climax.

I don’t know if the flick works from a “romantic” perspective, because whatever chemistry is meant to be represented in the sex scenes, I’m pretty sure those sex scenes aren’t meant to be from the perspective of “male” enjoyment, for lack of a better descriptor. Look, the director is queer, the two leads, not implying they’re in a relationship, but they’re both gay women – they’re not here to titillate the “dirty mac brigade”, as it used to be called. I daresay it’s for a selection of the audience that I’m not part of, but that’s okay, I’m not complaining. Too much other cinema is made for what they imagine my demographic is, all powerful and all-consuming.

And I can’t pretend I always get what Kristen Stewart does as an actor. I find it fruitless to compare her to any other working actors. I think she should be judged, solely, by what she does compared to other performances of hers. Whatever anyone thinks about her performance here, it’s probably perfectly in alignment with this role. She plays a fiercely determined white trash woman wanting to escape her life of violence and crime without the means or ability to do so, who meets someone she instantly clicks with and gives injections into her butt in order to make her more powerful, more chaotic, more loveable, from her perspective.

And somehow, it works.

There are levels and levels to all of this, and I’m not going to tease all or any of those threads out, but I have to think there is, within the trans masc imagery / stylings, the incredible musculature that Katy O’Brian assays (which is distinct from the actual look of female bodybuilders, which the flick goes out of its way to emphasise), and the embodiment of the idea that what we often refer to as toxic masculinity can be parodied into a form so monstrous and so deranged that it can’t help but be hilarious.

I think the funniest scene in the flick for me is when two FBI agents are trying to brace Lou and convince her to roll over on her dad, and one of them, the presumably non-verbal one, looks through Lou’s choice of literature. The bemused expression on his face as he peruses her copy of Macho Sluts, which is a real short-story collection by Pat Califia, is chef’s kiss perfection.

Does it work? I’m not entirely sure. The ending is absolutely bonkers in a way that I can't even parse, even knowing that one of the characters is completely psychotic. But it, even with a further murder that happens during the end credits, is meant to somehow be the happy ending we’ve been owed ever since Thelma and Louise drove off of that cliff all those years ago…

But it was mostly enjoyable, if you’ve got the stomach or the proclivities for this kind of highbrow-trash combination.

7 times I was slightly miffed that they never even said that Love Lies Bleeding is a plant, one I’ve even got in my garden, but we call it amaranth out of 10

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“I fucking love you, you idiot” - Love Lies Bleeding