This Generation Just Got Its Thelma and Louise

From the minute Lou (Kristen Stewart) catches a glimpse of Jackie (Katy O’Brian) lifting weights at the gym where Lou works as a front-desk clerk, it’s over—“it” being Lou’s formerly dull day-to-day existence as a lonely lesbian in a small New Mexico town, as well as the audience’s last hope of maintaining a normal resting pulse. Within hours of first sharing a cigarette in the gym’s parking lot, the two have hooked up, steamily, at Lou’s place. By the next morning, Jackie has all but moved in, and their amour is about to get very fou, very fast.

The year is 1989, and thanks in part to the superstardom of Arnold Schwarzenegger, getting shredded is all the rage. Jackie, a drifter newly arrived in town, is an aspiring competitive bodybuilder who’s already a champion at using her body—its raw sexuality and brute strength—to get what she wants. She finds work as a waitress in the grubby restaurant of a shooting range on the outskirts of town after some transactional back-seat-of-the-car sex with the boss’s son-in-law (Dave Franco), who also happens to be Lou’s much-loathed brother-in-law. Loathed, at least, by Lou: Lou’s sister Beth (Jena Malone) stands by her man despite the regular insults and beatings she endures at his hands, while their father, Lou Sr. (a menacing, extravagantly bewigged Ed Harris), tolerates his daughter’s ongoing abuse, claiming he is merely respecting Beth’s wishes by refusing to confront her husband.

Lou Sr., we discover in a series of demonically red-lit flashbacks, is more than just a sexist gun-range owner. For decades he’s been running guns across the border and in the area’s criminal underworld, enabled by a local cop on the take and, for a time, assisted by his namesake daughter. Lou has been trying to steer clear of her dangerous dad and deadbeat brother-in-law, but her affair with Jackie brings her back into their orbit, with violent results for all concerned (not to mention several innocent bystanders). Soon it becomes clear that the very qualities that draw Lou so strongly to Jackie—her ferocity, her righteous rage, her total lack of impulse control—are the ones that threaten to get them both thrown in jail or worse.

Love Lies Bleeding can claim cinematic kinship with a lot of movies past. It’s a neo-noir lesbian romance à la Bound, a go-for-broke road movie in the tradition of Thelma and Louise, and, by moments, a work of surrealist body horror that pays homage to both David Cronenberg and David Lynch. The erotic close-ups on Jackie’s popping veins and oiled-up muscles even overtly reference the purple-pants-shredding transformations of Bruce Banner into the Incredible Hulk. But the result of all this remixing is neither a tired retread nor a hollow genre pastiche. Instead, this movie is its own thing, a proudly queer, stubbornly deranged romance with a self-assurance worthy of its steroid-shooting heroines—or are they antiheroines?

Director and co-writer Rose Glass, whose 2021 debut Saint Maud was a psychological horror film about a would-be religious mystic, goes in a completely different direction stylistically here, though both movies share a fascination with female self-transformation. Where Saint Maud, a claustrophobic two-hander set in a foggy seaside village in Northern England, was austere to the point of bleakness, Love Lies Bleeding is as gleefully maximalist as its setting in the wide-open American Southwest: It’s jampacked with fantasy sequences, workout montages that segue seamlessly into raunchy sex scenes, and periodic eruptions of gore so shocking they had the audience I saw it with gasping and covering our eyes in near-comical unison.

The last hour of this less than two-hour movie makes for a relentless suspense ride as the couple’s crimes, and the local cops’ suspicions, start to add up. The doomed lovers, often filmed beneath a clear night sky as if to remind us of their star-crossed fate, make one bad choice after another, sometimes to avenge or protect each other, sometimes to save their own skins. The script, by Glass and Weronika Tofilska, disrupts the simplistic “strong female lead” stereotype by showing us a co-dependent relationship between two indisputably strong but deeply flawed and at times pathologically disturbed women.

The events that befall Lou and Jackie in the final act grow ever less plausible as ’roid-fueled hallucinations and erotic fantasies start to interfere with their and our perception of external reality. But the dynamic that exists between the two feels real even to those of us who have never, say, left our partner behind to clean up a crime scene while we run off to Las Vegas to compete for a bodybuilding prize. Surely we’ve all felt from time to time like the one left behind with a bloody corpse and a bottle of Fantastik.

Glass has said she wrote the role of Lou specifically for Kristen Stewart, who immediately accepted upon reading the script—as she has said in conversation with the director, “I thought, Who the hell else is going to play this role?” Stewart does indeed seem born to play Lou, a lovesick enabler who both desires and resents her role as personal trainer, home chef, and, eventually, in-house crime fixer for the imperious, impetuous Jack (Lou’s androgynous nickname for her iron-pumping beloved). In the grand tradition of film-noir couples, these two together are far more dangerous than either one could be on her own, and the chemistry between Stewart and O’Brian, a real-life bodybuilder found in an extensive talent search, is believably combustible. In a strange way, their twisted bond is a queerer and crueler variation on the one between the lead couple in the movie series that first catapulted Stewart to fame: the Twilight saga. Jack’s physical strength, often shown by Glass as seen through Lou’s adoring eyes, is a kind of superhuman power; her dependence on her girlfriend is nothing if not vampiric, and Lou, for her part, desires nothing more than to exist in the orbit of Jack’s glittering sun.

Whether you consider this a threat or a promise, it’s important to go in knowing that on both the sex and violence fronts, Love Lies Bleeding goes extremely hard. There will be blunt-force trauma to the face, dead bodies disposed of in sickening ways, point-blank executions—and, on the sex side, kink play that runs the gamut from toe-sucking to fisting to something involving a strategically smoked cigarette. The film is sex-positive in that it posits pleasure and desire as necessary and life-giving forces, but it’s far from a feel-good ode to Sapphic bliss. The final twist, which runs underneath the closing credits, is a grim joke that plays on the audience’s expectations about Bonnie-and-Clyde-style stories of outlaw love. It’s as if the question Glass wants to leave us asking is “Be gay, do crime … and then what?”

Above all, for reasons that are hard to describe without sending the reader to see the film, which I would emphatically do, Love Lies Bleeding left me asking what Rose Glass will do next. Even when, in the second half, Glass occasionally seems to be pushing too hard for a visceral response (there’s a gross-out moment involving Ed Harris’ character that edges, intentionally or no, toward Grand Guignol), the viewer always feels herself to be in the deft hands of a truly cinematic filmmaker. The crime plot, if at times far-fetched, never feels thrown together as a mere pretext for the action scenes: The characters’ choices flow directly from who they are, and Glass knows how to use pacing, framing, and music (the thrumming score by Clint Mansell invokes both sci-fi and pulpy exploitation flicks) to lock in the audience’s attention. Wherever these two love-crazed lesbians’ poorly-thought-out plans take them, we’re along for the dizzying ride.