A Detailed Review of the Sex Scenes in Kristen Stewart’s Steamy New Thriller

In Sex Reviews, writers offer a sober critical assessment of the sex scenes in new films. This installment contains spoilers for Love Lies Bleeding.

Kristen Stewart shoving her hand into a clogged toilet is not how I expected the sexiest film of 2024 to begin. But in the unusual case of Love Lies Bleeding, writer-director Rose Glass’ follow-up to Saint Maud, it only makes sense that this disgusting, gory, hot, and shocking film would begin in those vomit-filled pipes. Set in 1989, the thriller follows the blossoming romance—and expanding biceps—of gym attendant Lou (Stewart) and wayward bodybuilder Jackie (real-life bodybuilder Katy O’Brian, in a starmaking turn). The two stumble upon each other as Jackie hitchhikes her way through the American Southwest in hopes of landing a coveted trainer job. Immediately enamored, they also stumble into a brutal (if justified?) quagmire that leaves multiple people dead.

Oh, and they have some supremely hot lesbian sex along the way! So, in our duties as two bona fide dykes of Slate (with two long-standing crushes on Stewart), we’re here to assess the body count and admire the bodies of Love Lies Bleeding.

Madeline: We begin our sexy journey with some pretty dismal self-pleasure. Lou, dead-eyed and uninterested in just about everything, clocks out of her toilet-unclogging shift. She pops a pretty grotesque-looking TV dinner in the microwave and then heads to the couch. Lying face down, she abandons her dinner at her feet and rubs one out while her cat, Happy Meal, devours the leftovers. It’s … certainly not the hottest Kristen Stewart masturbation scene in cinematic history. (That distinction goes to Personal Shopper.)

Christina: And yet—I didn’t hate it? It’s absolutely pathetic, but it does feel real—people with pets are always telling me, to my horror, how their fur children show up at inopportune moments during sex—and it made me want to comfort Lou rather than slowly back away from her sad, unshowered situation. (That’s the K-Stew magic.) I think the motivational cassette tape she’s using to help her quit smoking is actually playing in the background too? She’s trying! I hope she finished.

Madeline: Then there’s a smash cut to …

Madeline: All right, let’s get this out of the way: There is one straight sex scene in this otherwise sapphic fever dream. It’s a quick-and-dirty transactional car fuck between Jackie and J.J. (Dave Franco), Lou’s very married brother-in-law. It’s fast, it’s dull, and clearly it hasn’t awakened any romantic feelings between the two of them. But it does score Jackie a job waiting tables at a local gun range. What’d you think of this moment, Christina?

Christina: To me, this was a classic example of how straight sex is used in queer cinema: It serves only to show how much more deep, reciprocal, creative, and intense gay sex can be. The perfunctory shtupping establishes how hard Jackie has it right now (she’s unhoused, itinerant, and desperate for a job) and what a jerk J.J. is, but it isn’t particularly sexual. I was confused by the fact that, later, Jackie uses it to come out to Lou as bisexual, since it didn’t seem as if her own desire played into it at all. Anyway, let’s please move on!

Madeline: There are few scene archetypes I love more than a first encounter in a romance that’s utterly doomed. For Lou and Jackie, they meet in Crater Gym, and Lou’s wonder-struck. And who wouldn’t be? Donning a low-cut sports bra while pumping iron, Jackie is totally in the zone. Not to mention the fact that she’s glistening with sweat. She’s clearly taken the brusque aphorisms on the gym walls (“ONLY LOSERS QUIT”) to heart.

Christina: Lou abruptly and adorably shuts down the gym, seemingly before closing time, to get the gym bros to leave so she can say hey to Jackie. Within a few minutes, after punching the face of a beefy dude who hits on her, Jackie reveals that she’s bulking up for a bodybuilding competition. Lou responds with a romantic gesture: free steroid injections! Jackie is hesitant, but Lou almost insists. (Her fetish for muscle-bound bods is so strong I could smell it in the theater.) Jackie gives in. “Where do you want it?” Lou asks. (!) “In the butt,” Jackie replies. (!!!!!!) One steroid shot later, they’re making out on the gym floor, then they’re in Lou’s bedroom, hustling toward the bed.

Madeline: And it’s ON! We find Lou on top, pinning Jackie beneath her. In the midst of their enveloping makeout, Lou alternates between caressing Jackie’s tits and her huge biceps. Lou’s ravenous: It’s as if she can’t touch enough of Jackie’s body, like she’s running out of time. Of course, Lou also needs to eat Jackie out, and in her cunnilingus-induced ecstasy, Jackie seems somehow diminutive. It’s a brilliant turn for a film that closes with the muscular Jackie tossing Lou’s shrimpy body around in a jovial dance.

Christina: A lot has been said (by my wife) about Kristen Stewart’s lack of acting skills, and this scene will definitively, once and for all, prove the critics (my wife) wrong. Stewart’s character comfort zone is brooding or total emotional detachment, and here she’s like a puppy with a training treat. She actually scratches her head and whispers “Holy shit” when Jackie takes her top off, which betrays her total lack of chill. It’s very sweet, and the close-ups of Jackie’s twitching post-steroid muscles and bulging veins give us an idea of what the sex is like through Lou’s eyes. The synth-y soundtrack is hot too.

Madeline: Before Jackie can get to Vegas for her competition, she needs a comfy, unpretentious place to crash, yolkless omelets to consume, and a girlfriend to eat out. So, naturally, these two U-Haul and find a kind of domestic bliss for a few weeks. We end up in a fast-paced, sun-filled montage of training, eating, bodybuilding posing, and fucking. There are some rather inspired directorial choices throughout this montage, including a slow-motion, viscous shot of Lou separating the whites from the yolks that seamlessly cuts to Lou getting a little thank-you oral. Lou’s also finding time to get some reading in. The book in question? Macho Sluts.

Christina: The direction of this montage makes absolutely everything feel sexual. Definitely the whites dripping out of the eggshells, and also Lou preparing an injection for Jackie with the syringe cap between her teeth. She and Jackie are building a hard-bodied champion together, for their mutual pleasure. There are lots of tight shots of sweat-soaked skin, and at one point, Jackie guzzles a chocolate protein shake, which drips thickly down her chest. Lou cleans it up with her tongue. I think that this was a fun movie to film, for everyone.

Madeline: And boy was it fun to watch! This montage is also a charming showcase of this budding romance’s devilish side. Where the initial encounter was all steaminess, this sequence finds space for Lou and Jackie to poke fun, laugh together, and even … spring some more surprising sex on each other. That’s right: Lesbian toe-sucking finally gets its much-deserved silver-screen moment. The moment is frisky, and I’m all the more impressed after learning, from a post-screening Q&A with writer-director Rose Glass, that Katy O’Brian went from not knowing she was cast in this film to having her foot in an Oscar-nominated actor’s mouth in just a few weeks!

Christina: I KNOW. The professionalism at play! The foot scene is one of a few—including Lou’s insistence that Jackie try ’roids—that unsettled me and, to be real, excited me about their dynamic. Jackie has just done a set of pullups on a bar in the bedroom doorway and is dangling there by her hands while she rests. In a fit of playful and low-key coercive (abusive?) motivation, Lou flicks her lighter and holds it against the bottom of Jackie’s feet. Jackie freaks out and falls, and Lou immediately grabs Jackie’s foot to get the big toe in her mouth. A little sucking, a little biting. Jackie gives a halfhearted “ew” but goes along. It’s uncomfortable, it’s hot, and I think we’re meant to understand that Jackie doesn’t mind it?

Madeline: Jackie doesn’t mind the fraught toe-suckery, but their all-encompassing relationship takes a sour turn after an awkward double date with Lou’s sister and the aforementioned scumbag brother-in-law. After that, Lou learns of Jackie’s earlier survival sex work with J.J. and is enraged. The crisis of a gold-star dyke discovering her paramour’s hetero past and “tainted” body is one of my least favorite tropes, but I guess it’s apropos for a film set in 1989. It also sets the scene for a deliriously seductive makeup-sex scene.

Christina: Jackie is at the bathroom sink in Lou’s house (where she’s been living ever since their first night together) when Lou comes up behind her, sinks down to her knees, and starts worshipping her ass. “I want to stretch you out, see how far you can go,” Lou says. “Do you put your fingers inside when you fuck yourself? How do you do it? You wanna show me?” (Imagine me frantically transcribing this dialogue by the light of my Alamo Drafthouse table.) My favorite part of this sex scene, before any sex has actually taken place, is that we see how obsessed Lou is with admiring all that her lover’s body can do—the extremes it can hit. The film itself is highly fixated on the weird and disgusting and erotic potential of the body, and Lou is too. The scene also fleshes out their power play: Despite her job in the gym, Lou is as scrawny as the K-Stew norm. Jackie could fully fuck her up, but she doesn’t. (In one scene, we see her tackle Lou on the bed, and she does go down on Lou, but she never really tops.) When she bottoms for Lou, it’s a kindness. She’s letting Lou take control, which is maybe the ultimate form of control.

So Jackie does what Lou wants—she masturbates about 3 inches from Lou’s face. Lou is skeptical: “Is that really how you do it?” This is the best line in the film, I think, because it cuts to the heart of a real sexual dynamic that’s rarely tackled in fiction! Jackie is putting on a show, and Lou sees right through it. It’s a laugh line but also incredibly intimate.

Madeline: God bless your rapid-fire transcription, Christina, because I was too mesmerized by the moment to try to write it all down. I have some chicken-scratch “I wanna stretch you out” in my notes and one other crucial piece of dialogue from this scene. Two words: “Good girl.” Lou murmurs in gratitude and admiration to close out their makeup sex. It’s a moment of absolution, and for me, it framed this entire encounter as a kind of penance on Jackie’s part.

It’s telling to me that both of us seem to be embracing religious terms when trying to articulate why this scene was so hot. The devotion of these two—and the way that devotion continues while our two antiheroines become embroiled in a murderous mess—is tantamount to a kind of faith-based adoration. It might kill them, but they won’t let go of each other.

Christina: This is the part of the review where we ask: How horny did it make you? And while there were other parts of this instant body-horror classic that gestured toward the sexual—Lou with her arm elbow-deep down a toilet drain, or Jackie holding down Lou’s dad (Ed Harris!) while she presses the barrel of a gun down his throat—the sex-sex is front-loaded, before the real violence and gore start up. Which meant that by the time the credits rolled, I was pleased and disturbed but thoroughly unaroused. The sex itself, though? Let’s just say I’ll be thinking about Lou’s bathroom dialogue until 2 Love 2 Lies 2 Bleeding comes out. On the whole, I give it a 7.

Madeline: If this film is a Christina 7, I’m dying to know what a Christina 10 is!

Christina: In a Christina 10, we would have seen Lou … stretching … Jackie … out.

Madeline: HA! Fair enough. I’m going to give the film an 8.5 out of 10, since we really don’t get another great sex scene after the indelible bathroom moment. But this film has me thrilled about what’s to come from Stewart in the future.

Though this movie is not the first daringly sexual turn for the once-maligned star of a soapy teen vampire romance, Love Lies Bleeding heralds a new, exciting, and butchy era for Stewart. She even recently told Rolling Stone, “Now, I want to do the gayest fucking thing you’ve ever seen in your life. If I could grow a little mustache, if I could grow a fucking happy trail and unbutton my pants, I would.” That masculine, DGAF mentality is on full display in Love Lies Bleeding, and I, for one, am hungry for more.