Review: ‘Love Lies Bleeding’ takes the world to task, succeeds, and looks good doing it

Take a great, big, bloody, sexy bow, Rose Glass and company; Love Lies Bleeding is the stuff of carnal dreams.

Indeed, at no point throughout the months leading up to the release of Love Lies Bleeding was any secret made of what it set out to do, and if you somehow manage to not pick up what the film is putting down by the time you see it yourself (and dear lord, should you ever be seeing Love Lies Bleeding for yourself), then you, on some level, need to learn how to stop being dishonest with yourself; take that as you will.

Okay, so maybe that’s a bit hyperbolic, but honestly, it’s only slightly so; with a slew of lived-in, delectably disturbing performances splattered across a landscape of gorgeous sensualities, all tied up in a nice, rugged, neon, pulpy knot of a story, Love Lies Bleeding is an artistic triumph of the highest variety.

The film stars Kristen Stewart as Lou, an aloof gym manager whose estranged father, Lou Sr. (Ed Harris), has committed quite a few murders in his time, having roped Lou into some of them in the past (hence “estranged”). When aspiring bodybuilder Jackie (Katy O’Brian) passes through town on her way to a competition, the two of them hit off and become far more involved with each other than either of them planned. But, when an incident involving Lou’s violently abusive brother-in-law J.J. (James Franco) escalates fatally, the inconceivably severe impact it has on Lou and Jackie’s relationship quickly becomes the least of their worries.

Let’s first address the elephant in the room here; Love Lies Bleeding is an extremely hot movie. Indeed, the first act especially drips with a limitless sexuality that soars like an eagle in every sense of the word, because at the root of everything that makes Love Lies Bleeding such a fantastic film is an iron — nay, a diamond — grip on the earthly counterpart of the divine feminine, and its entirely unsanitized, assertively hungry approach to female sexuality is perhaps the single greatest springboard for that. Even Clint Mansell’s score, broodingly electric in all of its synths and chimes as the film glows its multifaceted shade of red, evokes an unbridled mutation of desire that goes a long way in making one feel a bit funny in their underpants.

But even before Love Lies Bleeding lets us know just how hot it is, it does something even more important; the very first scene of the film lets us know exactly which ideological empire is about to fall here. As we’re introduced to Lou’s workplace, the aforementioned gym, the stage is perfect; a swath of sweaty, hairy, half-naked male bodies pumping iron on the various pieces of equipment. This is not a contrast to the aforementioned sexiness, though, oh no; it reminds us that, for the moment, Love Lies Bleeding takes place in a man’s world, where women aren’t allowed to take up the same physical or emotional spaces that men occupy in their sleep, be it violence, flesh indulgence, or some other third thing. Lou and Jackie, of course, strongly disagree with that assessment.

Speaking of Lou, there’s no question that Stewart — fresh off her bold Rolling Stone cover story that, perhaps quite intentionally, captures the ethos of this film all too well — was born to bring the grit-coated, sensitive soul of Lou to life on the big screen. With every aggressively haunting tick of Lou’s limbs, every facial muscle resembling a crack in an unkempt dam, and every split-second calm before the many storms, be them lovely, heinous, or delicate, Stewart transcends the top of her game here, and Love Lies Bleeding should absolutely, positively, henceforth be known as the film that the world knows the actress for, rather than that other movie. O’Brian’s explosive turn as Jackie, an avalanche in human form, is engrossingly magnetic in its own right, and it’s largely through Jackie’s animus that Love Lies Bleeding‘s cerebral identity comes to life.

Indeed, though Lou’s position in the story — one where the slaughter-happy shadow of her father looms overhead, armed with a cold, hard pistol that most of mankind’s greatest cowards have a tendency to hide behind when there’s something to uphold — has more than its fair share of key thematic weight, it’s Jackie who serves as the emotional battering ram for Love Lies Bleeding. Her bare-knuckle approach to bad people (the fact that I mentioned pistols moments ago is no coincidence), her proactively racy rendezvous’ with Lou, and the way in which she wordlessly begs for an opportunity to relish in her authenticity and decimate anything that prevents that for her or her loved ones; Jackie is the match for the film’s neck-deep vat of nitroglycerin.

Perhaps one of the film’s greatest victories, however, is how its no-holds-barred take on raw femininity refuses to look down upon other expressions of femininity, which, given the subject matter, was no easy pitfall to avoid. The most striking moments between Lou and her sister Beth — Jena Malone’s bruised housewife who’s desperate to to “fill her role” in a household dominated by J.J. — however unstable they become on account of Lou’s frustration with Beth’s role in her own shackling, are sometimes moments of love, other times moments of anger, but always moments of shameless honesty in staring at victimhood masquerading as femininity. Even Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov), the seemingly ditzy, flowery, “girly” lesbian who’s obsessed with Lou and blackmails her for a relationship, isn’t met with any true malice from Lou or, by extension, the film; it’s dispassionately disinterested in Daisy’s femininity, sure, but it still meets her where she’s at without outrightly rejecting her — insofar as it’s literally and subtextually appropriate for Daisy’s femininity to exist alongside that of the film’s, that is. And when it’s not, that’s okay, because this is a story about the film’s femininity first and foremost.

All in all, Love Lies Bleeding is the violent, stylish, panty-wetting grand slam of femininity that came straight from the dirt, was born alongside the universe, and is now asserting itself as one of A24’s best-ever features, courtesy of writer-director Rose Glass and her co-writer Weronika Tofilska, in all their tender genius.

Once again, Glass and company, take a bow and hold it for as long as you damn well please; you’ve more than earned it.