"Love Lies Bleeding" is the Truth

It's in theaters now. Don't delay.

I almost didn’t go to Love Lies Bleeding. I’ve been so disappointed with the films everyone else seem to love lately that I thought I’d just wait until it was streaming. See, I thought Oppenheimer was good but very flawed. I kinda hated Barbie. I couldn’t even muster enough enthusiasm to go see Dune 2. To be fair, Love Lies Bleeding was supposed to be a little different. It’s not a blockbuster but a queer crime caper starring Kristen Stewart, who I know and respect, and Katy O’Brian, who I’d never heard of (apparently she was in The Mandalorian, good for her). But the trailer didn’t excite me, and it looked like it was a lot of gun fetishization, a trope I’ve grown so tired of. But the movie theater is near the mall, and I needed a new suit, so I went. 

Holy cow, did I almost screw that up. Love Lies Bleeding hooked me from the start, surprised me more times than I could count, and took a turn in the final third that knocked me right on my ass. Is it a perfect movie? I don’t know. Maybe not. But it’s a movie that can make you believe in cinema again.

It starts at a gym, where I’ve been spending a lot of time lately, but this gym ain’t like my gym. It’s 1989 in rural New Mexico, so this place is really just a big warehouse filled with sweaty, ‘roided-up dudes. In the bathroom is Lou (Stewart), the gym’s manager whose duties apparently include unclogging toilets and fending off the advances of the town’s only other lesbian Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov), undaunted by a woman up to her elbows in shit. Into this literally crappy world waltzes Jackie (Katy M. O’Brian), with her thick muscles and perfect curves, and Lou is immediately in love.

From there, things go wrong…and right and wrong and right again. In some ways, it’s a classic tale about a pair of outcasts who miraculously find each other and try to make it in a world that wants to deny them their happiness. Lou’s dad, Lou Sr. (Ed Harris), runs the local gun range. His other daughter Beth (Jena Malone) has a shit-heel husband named JJ who works there and, when he’s not working, beats her and screws around. Lou and Jackie want to decamp for greener pastures, but his vileness cannot be ignored, and their confrontation sets off a chain reaction familiar to devotees of film noir. These ladies just want their little acre of happiness, but it’s a cruel world dominated by evil men. Director Rose Glass uses a neat trick to express this visually, filming Lou or Jackie alone in a close-up, before men intrude upon their solitude and crowd them in the frame.

The film is cruel, too, but only to those who deserve it. Glass, in her follow-up to 2020’s horror flick Saint Maud, is not afraid of grisly violence, but she doesn’t lean on it. Love Lies Bleeding is a noir and a caper. It has horror elements, and, in a key moment, even alludes to the superhero movie. It’s an original vision that puts all the genre tropes I’ve grown tired of into a blender and blasts them at full speed until they cohere into something new. I thought it was going to be a queer revenge flick, and it is that, but it’s also funny and sad and scary and gripping and, on occasion, awe-inspiring. Whatever box you try to put Love Lies Bleeding in, it will claw its way out of.

Genre-bending is a fun exercise, but it’s the relationship between Lou and Jackie that make the film work. On the page, the two leads have rich backstories that inform their choices—especially Lou—but even more, the sharp characterizations from Stewart and O’Brian drive our emotional engagement and elevate the film above its genre underpinnings. With her compelling physique and natural charisma, O’Brian has star quality in spades, but she also knows how to play someone hiding behind their physicality. Stewart, meanwhile, exudes a combination of tenderness and toughness not seen since James Dean. Those who still question her talents need to have their heads examined.

I could say more, and I’ve probably said too much already. The joy of Love Lies Bleeding is how it surprises you and subverts your expectations. How just when you think you’ve got a handle on it, it eludes your grasp. So just go, but before you do, hear this. Last month, Ethan Coen released his own queer crime caper, and it was really not very good. That was a bummer. But it turned out the closest thing to a proper Coens movie—a wickedly funny crime film elevated into high art through sheer artistry—since they split up was waiting just around the corner. That’s a lot for Rose Glass to live up to, but Love Lies Bleeding made me a believer.