Lou’s small and lonely life suddenly swells with possibility when a woman named Jackie enters it. Lou (Kristen Stewart), a rakish and reclusive gym manager living in a practically anonymous pocket of New Mexico, is working a characteristically boring shift when Jackie (Katy O’Brian), a nomad with body-building ambitions, catches her eye and suddenly gives a listless evening at work unexpected urgency. They connect after the gym closes for the night over cigarettes in the parking lot — which gets heated when Jackie punches a passing homophobe who calls Lou a slur — then begin, just a few moments later, a romance, its start unofficially ringed in with a dose of steroids Lou tenderly injects into Jackie’s muscled ass. (Lou shills her illicit product to members as a kind of side hustle.)
Lou feels trapped in a town she desperately wants to escape. She only sticks around, she says, to look out for her sister Beth (Jena Malone), who’s in a physically abusive marriage with a mulleted, sleazy gun-range manager named J.J. (Dave Franco). Jackie, who immediately moves in with her new paramour, does not, in contrast, think she will be here long. She just wants to save a little money before entering a bodybuilding contest in Vegas. She’s confident she’ll win; she wants to parlay the prize not just into a competitive lifting career, but also into professional personal training, perhaps somewhere in California.
Stewart and O’Brian’s chemistry is so off-the-charts — given many moments of catharses with an unabashedly hot set of sex scenes — that it’s easy to root for their relationship, for Jackie’s long-shot dreams that also become Lou’s by proxy. O’Brian, who’s never before had a leading role like this, is a revelation, all boldness and jangly confidence that sometimes seem like they really could manifest in something real. Stewart gives one of her best performances yet, the jittery introversion often imbuing her work better deployed than ever as someone used to purposely keeping to herself. (It’s also a pleasure to see Stewart, one of our very few lesbian movie stars, get to lean into that part of her identity with such aplomb.)
Kristen Stewart in Love Lies Bleeding. All imagery courtesy of A24.
In Love Lies Bleeding, a squirmy, tense neo-noir living in a natural middleground of absurdity and brutality that feels Coen Brothers-adjacent, Lou’s dysfunctional family will prove a force dirtying dreams more than illegal steroids ever could. (And those steroids do a whole lot to mess things up.) After one of J.J.’s outbursts leaves Beth in the hospital, Jackie, roused both by her lover’s earth-shaking anger and, it’s suggested, textbook roid rage, one night marches over to J.J. and Beth’s vacant home and awaits the former’s return so that she can bash his face into a table so many times that even saying it’s been beaten into a pulp feels like an undersell. A freaked-out Lou helps clean up the mess; in the process we’ll learn about something from which Lou herself has been long trying to run away: that she used to assist with this kind of thing all the time growing up because of her father, Lou, Sr. (a menacingly quiet, truly frightening Ed Harris). He’s a psycho she deeply resents with long hair nearly as unnerving as his affinity for collecting big bugs; he basically runs the town via an organized-crime operation so powerful that the local cops answer to him before they do the police chief.
Lou deals with the aftermath of J.J.’s murder by making it seem like Lou, Sr. — whom, we learn, has attracted interest from the F.B.I. soon after the film starts — is the one responsible. Love Lies Bleeding — nasty, brutish, and pretty short at a little over 90 minutes — feels like a protracted anxiety attack after Jackie’s impulsive killing, reaching frantic new heights when Jackie starts getting manipulated by Lou, Sr., and a rotten-toothed gym hanger-on with a thing for Lou (Anna Baryshnikov) starts asking too many questions.
Love Lies Bleeding is Rose Glass’ second feature. Her first was 2019’s admirable, albeit torturous to watch, Saint Maud, a movie where a nurse falls deeper and deeper into a religious fanaticism that ultimately will kill her. This follow-up is much more stylish (it’s set in the 1980s and feels aesthetically informed, for better and for worse, by the neo-noirs made during that era by the likes of William Friedkin and Michael Mann) and enjoyable. But it isn’t a complete 180, still fascinated with the perils of toxic love and how quests toward self-betterment can easily turn into self-destruction. Both movies also cannot help but, in their endings, treat the characters’ fantasies with a certain seriousness that, in practice, would feel sillier if the audacity didn’t feel so right for characters whose ideal happy endings hinge on delusion. It’s an assured, rattling movie that suggests Glass’ work will only get stronger.
This review was originally published on March 12, 2024. We’re republishing it in honor of Kristen Stewart Month.
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