‘Love Lies Bleeding’ Review: Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian Will Set Your World on Fire in Rose Glass’ Psychosexual Revenge Thriller | Berlinale 2024

All of you Saint Maud apologists, rejoice, for British rising star Rose Glass is back. Nothing screams comeback louder than a queer romance thriller where a gym manager falls for a bodybuilder on her way to the nationals, that’s Love Lies Bleeding for you. With one of the strongest debuts in recent times under her belt, Glass has proven that first features don’t need to play it safe to succeed. The jump from horror to erotic thriller is not that big though, since both require meticulousness and spontaneity in equal measure to make a good watch. Genre tropes are one thing, but using cinematic means to their full potential is what really makes a difference. We are thankful the British director got so much to work with, from a riotous script (co-written with Weronika Tofilska who’s worked on shorts, as well as episodes of His Dark Materials and Hanna), to Kristen Stewart and a pitch-perfect cast.

It’s 1989 and Jackie (ex-competitive bodybuilder Katy O’Brian) has just arrived in small town New Mexico: she is homeless for a day, using a bridge as both a shelter and pull-up bars. There’s no time to waste because this charismatic young athlete is in it to win it; the Las Vegas finals await her. After a dubious parking lot encounter at the film’s beginning, the guy who promises her a job at a shooting range, JJ (a superbly awful Dave Franco), turns out to be the brother-in-law of her future lover, Lou (Kristen Stewart). From the moment Lou lays eyes on Jackie in the gym she manages, everything shifts. Her monotonous world is suddenly shaken, imbued with the passion of a new encounter in a place where nothing really happens.

Glass brings in her Saint Maud entourage in the face of cinematographer Ben Fordesman and editor Mark Towns, whose synergy can paint a subjective reality so rich that it often—or always—overpowers the objective one. Lou, for example, is tortured by nightmarish visions of a cavern, guns, and killings; when we’re made privy to these shots, the screen turns scarlet as she is, literally, seeing red. The erotic scenes lock Jackie in close-ups in and out of the bedroom and the camera propulsively focuses on throbbing veins and flexing muscles and other times put Jackie on a pedestal with shots so full of her that they might explode.

In other words, throughout Love Lies Bleeding, the characters’ worlds are pliable enough to subsume unhealthy amounts of desire, violence, and unspoken trauma. The result is majestic and even if at times confusing—what is real and what is delusion? —it all makes complete sense in terms of the intensity of these characters, their willingness to crash and burn in the name of ego and libido. The first touch exchanged between the two is through a needle in Jackie’s behind, with Lou injecting her with steroids even before they’ve kissed. No wonder, such love is intoxicating.

Naturally, it’s the central relationship that takes the film into psychosexual realms. Aside from constantly questioning what love is, the characters keep challenging what love does. Its power dynamics are ever shifting and somehow elastic not only because it is a queer love, but also because it’s fueled by a pure urge to self-assert. This, of course, means different things to Jackie and to Lou. For the former, liberation comes through sculpting the body and testing its physical limits within the remit of bodybuilding beauty standards, while for the latter, a highly charged romance brings a newfound sense of self, or even revolt. The fact that Lou’s mother has been missing for twelve years and her estranged father, Lou Sr. (Ed Harris), runs this town from the shadows, in turn implicates her in a web of covered-up violence she never wanted part of: admitting this, though, would mean a dead end. 

Even if there’s no overt resistance to their queer relationship and Lou’s sexuality is never seen as an obstacle for the narrative, by effectively deciding to blow up everything that shackles her, she does rebel. Her father embodies the patriarchal order in its all-permeating presence; so does her sister Beth (Jena Malone) who’s locked into a toxic marriage with the abusive JJ; but when a girl with a dream (Jackie) meets a girl with no dreams at all (Lou), their conjoined powers may have what it takes to change the world. Or at least a world: as proof of this, Love Lies Bleeding ends with bright light washing over the couple, sunrise instead of neon, this time around.

Grade: A-

This review is from the 74^th Berlin International Film Festival where Love Lies Bleeding screened in the Berlinale Special Gala section. It will be released in the U.S. on March 8, 2024.