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The Do List

‘Love Lies Bleeding’ Seduces With Sex and Suspense Before Spiraling

Rae Alexandra
Kristen Stewart's latest is a lesbian love story on steroids — literally.
A muscular woman in cropped top and short shorts leads against a tomboyish woman sitting on top of a truck.
Katy O'Brian and Kristen Stewart doing erotic lesbian business in ‘Love Lies Bleeding.’ (A24)

Love Lies Bleeding is a weird goddamn movie.

It manages to be incredibly sexy one moment and turn-away-from-the-screen repulsive the next. Graphic violence and ironic humor rub up against one another. Everyone looks like a dirty trashbag, but in a way that is somehow pleasing to the eye. (Not dissimilar to 1996’s Trainspotting, I suppose — if Trainspotting had more perms and greasy mullets.)

It’s also a movie that spends two-thirds viscerally steeping itself in gritty realism, only to erupt into a surreal fantasy that flounders in the last act.

Yes. Please take my word for it: Love Lies Bleeding is a weird goddamn movie that doesn’t just defy a single genre, it actively flips all of them off.

At the outset, this is a story that’s unusual in the best possible way. The setting is small-town New Mexico in 1989. Grumpy, chain-smoking gym employee Lou (Kristen Stewart) meets bodybuilding out-of-towner Jackie (Katy O’Brian). The two immediately shack up and begin a steamy — albeit steroid-enhanced — relationship. Jackie works at a nearby gun range that’s run by Lou’s estranged father, Lou Sr (Ed Harris). Jackie gets her job via J.J. (Dave Franco) after the two share a brief sexual encounter on her first night in town. J.J. also happens to be married to Lou’s sister Beth (Jena Malone), whom he viciously beats on a regular basis.

The bulk of Love Lies Bleeding is a brilliantly acted, thoroughly engrossing, slow spiral into increasingly violent, desperate and complicated circumstances. J.J.’s actions set the characters on a crash course in which people are killed, bodies are concealed, traps are set, lines are blurred and allegiances are changed. At its core, the film is about love and monstrousness and how the two can intersect. But it’s also about broken families, lonely people and corrupt systems.

If Love Lies Bleeding had successfully retained that tone and momentum throughout, it could have been a damn-near perfect movie. Where it throws itself drunkenly off a cliff is in trying too hard to labor its main raison d’être: the idea that love is capable of driving people to unthinkable actions.

Once the main characters are all thoroughly tied up in each other’s bad decisions, the script can’t quite figure out a sensible way to resolve itself. And with that, writer-director Rose Glass throws out the low-key, synth-enhanced, grimy sexiness that originally set the tone in favor of cartoonish imagery, a sharp shift into surreality and, worse still, plot holes.

Still, there is enough to marvel at here that I can’t, in good conscience, tell you to skip Love Lies Bleeding altogether. The aesthetics and misfit fashions alone are worth the viewing time. Then there’s all the hot-but-realistically-low-key sex between Lou and Jackie. Kristen Stewart’s slowly unraveling performance is magnificent. Katy O’Brian and her rippling muscles are consistently mesmerizing. And Ed Harris is so sinister here, this performance makes his Westworld character look like a romantic lead.

So, by all means, go and see Love Lies Bleeding for all of the above. Just don’t expect to get lost in its dirty little orbit for too long. It never quite sticks the landing.

‘Love Lies Bleeding’ officially hits Bay Area big screens on March 15, 2024. Special preview screenings begin in select San Francisco and Oakland theaters on March 12. 

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