‘Love Lies Bleeding’: Kristen Stewart’s Queer, Sexed-Up Noir Will Rock Your World

All film noirs start with a bad decision. Love Lies Bleeding, Rose Glass’s follow-up to her cult horror movie Saint Maud and the most case-hardened Southwestern pulp this side of Jim Thompson, kicks off with a doozy. Lou (Kristen Stewart) cleans toilets and works the desk at a gym in New Mexico. Jackie (Katy O’Brian), a would-be competitive bodybuilder, has just breezed into town and strolls in for a workout. Soon, these two will spend long nights ravaging each other, dumping corpses, dodging bullets, and running for their lives. But before any of that first-hand carnal knowledge and carnage takes place, they lock eyes across a crowded weight room. That’s the big mistake. They are destined for each other from the minute they see a kindred restless, bruised spirit. Neither of them qualify as either saps or femme fatales. This duo is simply doomed.

A potent mix of sex, violence, surrealism, and scorched-earth Americana, Love Lies Bleeding had been earmarked early on as something extreme and unique, and to say that K-Stew & Co. did not disappoint in that regard would be putting it mildly. In fact, that’s the only context in which the word mild might be associated with this beast-mode crime thriller. Set in the late Eighties, right as the Berlin Wall goes down and the level of post-Reagan paranoia starts going up, this genderbent ode to good old-fashioned amour fou doubles down on everything from its proud queerness to its pitch-black nihilism. Love means never having to say you’re sorry, but it may mean you have to occasionally smash open someone’s jaw on a coffee table.

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It doesn’t take long for Lou to fall into Jackie’s pumped-iron arms, or for Jackie to parlay flirtation, mutual lust, and free steroids into a stable place to stay. Not that she doesn’t fall for her as hard as Lou does for this stranger with the ripped delts — they each sense something dangerous about the other. Besides, as soon as Jackie can log in a few weeks at her temporary new job and get in shape for an upcoming competition in Las Vegas, she can find her own place. The bad news: She’s working for Lou’s father (Ed Harris, looking like the host of a redneck Tales From the Crypt). He runs a local gun range. He also runs guns illegally to Mexico. The Feds have been sniffing around for a while now. Oddly enough, anyone who might blow the whistle on him has a nasty habit of suddenly disappearing.

There’s also the matter of who got Jackie this gig in the first place, i.e. Lou’s scumbag of a brother-in-law J.J. (Dave Franco). He also does the bidding of the town’s resident arms dealer, and given the way that Lou’s sister Beth (Jena Malone) has a habit of showing up with black eyes and broken arms, has a cruel streak in him. One night, he goes too far. Beth ends up in the hospital. Lou ends up threatening to permanently end this piece of shit once and for all. Dad suggests restraint. Jackie goes ballistic. By the time Lou catches up with her girlfriend, her hulked-out sweetheart has taken action. “I made it right,” she says, in a daze. And that’s when everything goes very, very wrong.

That’s the plot, which sticks to the same hardboiled road paved by a million B movie auteurs and Black Lizard-approved authors. Love Lies Bleeding is much more about a vibe than an homage or a narrative journey, however, and that’s where Glass, her co-writer Weronika Tofilska, and her production team distinguish this nitro noir from other nouveau pulpy fictions. There’s a hallucinatory aspect to every red-tinted interlude involving Harris’s satanic majesty and Lou’s checkered past, with cinematographer Ben Fordesman amping up the glow of neon lights and grit of small-town, dead-end criminality. Every close-up of O’Brian’s bulging veins as she goes into berserker fits feels like a second-hand ‘roid-rage rush. The sound design makes gunshots or gut-punches sound seismic. Every hyperventilating sequence of passion or pummeling is dialed up to 11.

That definitely includes the sex scenes, which is what most folks will talk about when they talk about Love. You could not accuse them of being tame or timid — apparently blowing smoke up one’s ass is not just a euphemism — nor could you say they were gratuitous. Noirs have long worked on gender stereotypes, especially when it comes to the “evil” that women do. This film doesn’t blur such identifying males and female lines so much as obliterate and erase them, mixing up traditional masculinity and femininity to the point that you can’t separate one from the other. The sex scenes are the key to that. Part of the film wants to subvert those ideas with grand nonbinary gestures via these two performers, and part of it wants to simply get hot and heavy while Clint Mansell’s score goes full metal Skinemax.

It’d be a pity if the sex, violence, and an ending that would make PJ Harvey proud obscured how Stewart and O’Brian add their characters to the roster of great screen criminal couples: Bonnie and Clyde, Pierrot and Marianne, Kit and Holly, Violet and Corky. Stewart was already a queer icon before this, but her turn as Lou cements her out-and-proud antihero bona fides. As for O’Brian, a former cop and an actor who knows how to make exaggerated physicality seem enticing or menacing, this is the kind of role that defines a career. Everything she does will be measured by what she’s done here. Love Lies Bleeding doesn’t have time for a slow burn. It’s a movie that comes in hot and leaves in a molten blaze of glory.

(This review originally ran as part of coverage of the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.)

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