Some films just seem to insane and wonderful to exist. Rose Glass has unleashed her second feature-length film, Love Lies Bleeding, into a world that seems ready to embrace it. The queer underpinings of Saint Maud are now fully on display. It’s a marvel to behold as she turns this Reagan-era romance into something so violent and beautiful that it would be hard fathom. Love, turns out, is something that is rather violent and hard to fathom.
That’s always been the case, hasn’t it? When M. Night Shyamalan’s Knock at the Cabin came out I remember a friend describing their queer parents, who loved so desperately that it felt dangerous because at any moment it could be taken away. Luca Guadagnino captured that feeling in this same late-80s America with Bones & All. Rose Glass now takes it and strips away the softness that both of those films had, striping it away to something skinless and sinewy that elevates the body-horror ideas she’s played with before and makes them all the more romantic for it.
And she’s blessed with an embarrassment of talent onscreen. Kristin Stewart is an absolute icon at this point and she takes it to another level as Lou, a scrappy gym-owner and open lesbian in a small, desert-adjacent town. She’s not suppressed and the patrons of the gym clearly know and don’t care about her, a rarity even today in small-town America, but Lou still isolates and keeps from getting close to anyone. That all changes when Jackie (Katy O’Brian) rolls into town. Jackie has been living as a vagrant, moving from town to town on the way to Las Vegas for a bodybuilding competition in hopes of finding legitimacy and becoming a trainer. Lou immediately has the hots for Jackie and the two connect, hooking up and almost immediately moving in together.
Now why is this a problem? Well, because Lou has a past with her estranged father, Lou Sr. (Ed Harris). Lou Sr. may run a gun range, but his actual business is…well, everything. He runs guns, drugs, pays off police, and pretty much everything else. Lou and Lou Sr. don’t talk and they’ve come to a sort of peace, but when an interaction goes sideways and a death is involved all of the sudden Lou Sr. is very interested in what’s going on between his daughter and this muscly drifter.
Love Lies Bleeding takes these ingredients and shakes them up with a splash of thriller, a killer Clint Mansell score, and enough body horror to turn the heads of any Cronenberg fan. It’s a gutsy move, one that involves a lot of steroids and hallucinations, but it works onscreen right down to one of the most ridiculous finales I’ve ever seen.
And this movie is sexy! I’m a child of the 90s, I was raised in an era where romcoms and erotic thrillers all involved hot people with real chemistry having sex. We’re back, baby! So much of this romance is sold by the way Stewart holds her face, the way that O’Brian smolders, but the thing that shows a loving, emotional, and physical affair? Sex, and it’s handled with all of the dignity and grace one could ask for between writer/director and performers. It’s wonderful to see a film that can be as clever, intense, and thrilling as it is hot.
This won’t be an easy watch for some, particularly due to how magnificent the brief but intense spurts of violence are. Jaws are removed, heads are blown open, and that’s not including what kind of weird, bug-related nonsense Ed Harris gets up to. Glass isn’t holding anything back and neither was makeup supervisor Bryan Perkal. Each death and attack is lovingly twisted and on full display, giving audiences a few moments of titillation that aren’t related to our central couple.
I loved Love Lies Bleeding. Rose Glass is a director at the top of her game only two films in and I cannot WAIT to see what she does next.
Love Lies Bleeding can be rented or purchased digitally from all major retailers.
WRITE DRUNK; EDIT DRUNK 