The Ending of Kristen Stewart’s New Movie Has Audiences Gasping and Hollering. What Really Happened There?

This article contains spoilers for Love Lies Bleeding.

Shirts ripping. Muscles bulging. Giants traipsing through the clouds. In its final 15 minutes, the lesbian bodybuilding noir Love Lies Bleeding takes a leap from its gritty early-’90s Southwestern setting into the fantastical as Kristen Stewart’s abject Lou and her roid-raging inamorata Jackie fight to save their romance (and their lives). I watched Rose Glass’ intense thriller the first time in a sweaty fever matching that of the characters, and positively whooped at the film’s climax. Watching a second time, I marveled at how intricately Glass constructed her film, laying the groundwork throughout for its phantasmagorical ending—a mix of redemption and degradation shot in a style that’s part music video, part Coen brothers, part Incredible Hulk.

“I don’t like guns,” Jackie (Katy O’Brian) tells Lou’s father, Lou Sr., when she asks him for a job. She prefers, she adds, to depend on her own strength. (Lou Sr., played by a repulsive Ed Harris, wonders, reasonably, why she’s applying at a shooting range.) This distinction, between violence done with a gun and violence done with one’s own body, informs the entire film. Lou, who once shot people who threatened to inform on her dad’s gun-running, now prizes—almost worships—Jackie’s physical strength. When we first see Jackie, ever more roided up, commit violence, it’s with her hands: smashing Lou’s abusive brother-in-law JJ’s face against a coffee table. It’s terrible, of course, but there’s a purity to it, and Lou sets herself to work cleaning up the aftermath. It’s only once Jackie’s strength has failed her—when she snaps at a bodybuilding competition and, hallucinating, attacks other contestants—that she resorts to Lou Sr.’s style, shooting Lou’s old flame Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov) in the head.

A few scenes later, Lou’s father holds Jackie hostage at his mansion. When Lou unties her, Jackie shoves Lou aside and runs away, only stopping when Lou jumps on her back and rides her to the ground. On Lou Sr.’s pitted tennis court, Jackie points a gun at Lou but then fires it into the air in frustration. When she breaks down, Lou consoles her: “There is absolutely nothing wrong with you,” Lou says. She tells Jackie that she is—and it’s no accident Glass uses this word—incredible.

For who really is the monster in Love Lies Bleeding? Jackie thinks she’s a monster: Her mom even calls her one when she calls home, weeping, after shooting Daisy. Lou’s sister Beth (Jena Malone) calls Lou a monster, too: “You don’t know what love is,” Beth says bitterly. JJ (Dave Franco) is a monster, his hands bruised from beating Beth, until Jackie crushes him. Beetle-eating Lou Sr.’s a monster, even if he delegates most of his violence to the people in his employ.

In the film’s final confrontation, Lou Sr. shoots his daughter in the leg and then kneels before her one last time. It’s when he finally gets his hands dirty—poking a finger into Lou’s gunshot wound, making her scream in pain—that Jackie’s ultimate transformation begins. Jackie hears Lou’s cries and, incredibly, Hulks out. “It’s the ones you love the most that will always disappoint you in the end,” Lou Sr. says, but he’s wrong, for it’s love that causes Jackie’s lats and delts to rumble like earthquakes and grow, grow, tearing her shirt asunder and sending her thundering down the hill to Lou’s rescue. The astonishing moment when Jackie picks Lou Sr. up like a toy is a subjective coup de grâce, a purely cinematic look inside both Lous’ heads at once. To her Lou, Jackie is a beautiful giant, rescuing her with a smile; to Lou Sr., she’s a terrifying colossus, pinning him to the driveway as Lou points a gun at his head.

But she doesn’t fire. She’s not that kind of monster. Instead they escape, and Glass’ camera spins the fantasy they share: Jackie and Lou, now both giants, sparkling like the dawn sky, their heads poking above the clouds, taking huge joyous strides across the earth. Their love has made them great, greater than a puny crook like Lou Sr. could imagine. He’s left cowering in his driveway as the cops arrive.

But while that’s the movie’s climax, it’s not its end. “I didn’t want to let anyone off,” Glass has said about her movie’s final, grim twist. As Slate’s Dana Stevens wrote in her review, it’s as if the question Glass wants to leave us asking is “Be gay, do crime … and then what?” The pair cruise through the desert—until Lou hears a thump from the back of her truck. Daisy may have been shot in the head, but she’s still alive. Lou pulls over and looks at Jackie, asleep in the passenger seat, innocent once more. Lou knows better than anyone that, as Glass said, “anyone who does anything terrible probably thinks they’ve got a pretty good reason for doing it.” To save their love, Lou will have to be the monster. She climbs into the bed of the truck, looks down at a desperate Daisy, and takes matters into her own hands.