For most of its first act, the new film Love Lies Bleeding is a dreamy romance between nervy gym manager Lou (Kristen Stewart) and vagabond bodybuilder Jackie (Katy O’Brian). But the dream snaps after thirty minutes, with a violent scene that produces a horrifically mangled corpse.
Lou asks, “What happened?” Jackie answers, “I made things right.”
Even viewers still upset by the visceral images on screen would agree with Jackie’s assessment. Jackie stopped a chronic abuser of women. The retribution feels just; it feels moral.
But writer/director Rose Glass has more in mind than simple morality. An overheated neo-noir with two queer women at the center, Love Lies Bleeding blurs all barriers, resulting in an ecstatic—and sometimes nauseating—vision of liberation.
In its broadest strokes, the movie repeats familiar story beats about doomed lovers. In the summer of 1989, Lou resents her ramshackle New Mexico hometown, where she works at a gym owned by her father, Lou Sr. (Ed Harris), the local criminal kingpin. While her mother disappeared over a decade ago, Lou stays to keep an eye on her older sister Beth (Jena Malone), who is a mother with two children by her cruel husband, J.J. (Dave Franco).
Jackie rolls into Lou’s life while hitchhiking her way to Las Vegas. A sweet bodybuilder with dreams of winning a competition in Vegas, Jackie falls for Lou immediately. But instead of taking Lou away to a better life, Jackie gets trapped in the morass of her new girlfriend’s family.
Plots about lovers gone astray drive many noir films, including The Big Heat, Double Indemnity, and The Postman Always Rings Twice. Glass twists the formula by putting two lesbian women at the center of this story, but that’s far from the only transgression she has in mind.
Even by the standard of Southern-fried crime tales like A Streetcar Named Desire or William Friedkin’s Killer Joe, Love Lies Bleeding has an aesthetic of perspiration. Glass leans into trash fashion, including the gray mane that connects from the sides of Lou Sr.’s bald head to the middle of his back, J.J.’s rat tail and spotty mustache, and Lou’s ever-present cigarette.
The opening credits roll over images of bodies sweating as they pump iron. We first meet Lou using her gloved hand to free the refuse clogging a discolored toilet. When the violence ramps up, bodies get pierced and twisted and burned. Characters vomit and pee, they spit and bleed, all presented with maximum viscosity.
Against these unsettling bodily images, Glass also includes many scenes of the joy people take in their bodies. For an actor with such an imposing physique, O’Brian gives a warm and vulnerable performance. She lets the glee stay on Jackie’s face as she practices her routine in front of Lou.
Glass and cinematographer Ben Fordesman shoot sex scenes between the women with both frankness and excitement. In the first, synth and bass pound on the soundtrack as Lou runs her mouth along Jackie’s chiseled chest and abs, heightening the pleasure they take in each other’s bodies.
The ways Lou and Jackie use their bodies disrupt their world, but not in the way most viewers would expect. In spite of his many faults, Lou assures Jackie that Lou Sr. isn’t homophobic. In fact, save for one or two slurs tossed by bystanders, no one in this otherwise conservative-seeming 1989 town seems to care about Jackie, Lou, or Lou’s unwanted admirer Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov).
Nor does the movie break down into a simple distinction between the patriarchy and women. Sure, all the heavies in the movie, whether cops or criminal enforcers, are men, but Glass has not written a movie about Lou and Jackie fighting against a system designed to destroy women. Rather, Love Lies Bleeding has little use at all for established gender markers, as demonstrated by the make-up in the girly, flower-covered purse that Jackie carries in her muscled arms or the similarities between Lou and Lou Sr.
This disregard for normative distinctions opens the movie to stark breaks not just from genre but even from reality. The film regularly dips into moments of the surreal, sometimes driven by the steroids that Lou gives Jackie and sometimes because of the overwhelming emotion that mesmerizes the women.
The most baffling reality breaks occur when excitement overwhelms Jackie. A cracking sound accompanies extreme close-ups on her biceps and back as the veins pulse and the muscles intensify. Her strength grows to superhuman levels for reasons the film has no interest in explaining.
No one watching Love Lies Bleeding in 2024 can help but think of the Incredible Hulk or his cousin She-Hulk, the green-skinned do-gooders of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And to be sure, Jackie does at times use her muscles to put bad guys in their place, such as a would-be suitor who harasses her and Lou early in the film.
When placed within a world of noir characters and superheroes, the love between Lou and Jackie is a disruptive force that mutates all claims that others make on their bodies.
Love Lies Bleeding may be a film about two women evading cops and criminals, but none of its moral signifiers—badges and guns, superheroes, even the flames of Hell—point to any familiar end. Not even Jackie’s steroid use or the occasional cruelty between the heroines land in the way one would expect. Instead, Glass’s movie is queer in every sense of the word. It disrupts all forms of normativity—aesthetic, moral, or otherwise.
When placed within a world of noir characters and superheroes, the love between Lou and Jackie is a disruptive force that mutates all claims that others make on their bodies. Only they will decide what they do with their bodies, and they use those bodies to love one another, in whatever form that takes.
That queer, liberating love is the only moral that Rose Glass gives her movie. It’s the only way that Love Lies Bleeding can imagine something made right.