A sexy lesbian love story, which soon evolves into a scuzzy crime plot—the idea behind Love Lies Bleeding hasn’t been done this well since the Wachowskis made Bound in 1996. If you’re looking for a movie with earnest, positive LGBTQ representation, look elsewhere. Go watch Rustin on Netflix. But Love Lies Bleeding, while uneven at times, is an audacious delight, a movie not afraid to show its protagonists as violent and disgusting.
Love Lies Bleeding, directed by Rose Glass (Saint Maud), is set in a small New Mexico town in 1989, and thanks to a reference to George H.W. Bush’s famous speech about crack cocaine in Lafayette Park, we know the exact date of the events, in early-September of that year. The period detail is just right for a depressed small town in the late-1980s, including vintage gym equipment and some of the worst haircuts you’ve ever seen on both men and women. Ed Harris’ bald head/ponytail combination is almost worth the price of admission by itself.
Ethan Coen’s recent Drive-Away Dolls was also about a lesbian duo taking on criminals but gave it a certain lightheartedness. Love Lies Bleeding has a darker and sleazier tone that recalls earlier Coen movies like Blood Simple. In Love Lies Bleeding, Kristen Stewart plays Lou, a gym manager with a mysterious past. One day she meets Jackie (Katy O’Brian), a drifter and aspiring bodybuilder with whom she begins a steamy affair, one rendered graphically in a series of love scenes.
Both have shady pasts, with Lou’s tied to her estranged father, also named Lou (Ed Harris), who controls the town’s criminal rackets. Adding to the scumbag action is J.J. (Dave Franco), the abusive and sleazy husband of Lou’s sister (Jena Malone), a man who sports an even worse haircut than his father-in-law’s. On the margins is Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov, Mikhail's daughter), who just about walks off with the film as a psychotic flirt.
Can Lou and Jackie’s love survive these circumstances and the difficulties of their pasts? Will Jackie ever make it to that bodybuilding competition in Vegas? And is Love Lies Bleeding the first significant film ever to paint the use of anabolic steroids positively? The performances are all outstanding, with Stewart successfully leveraging her public persona, and O’Brian breaking through with a one-of-a-kind role. Anna Baryshnikov, best known from the Apple show Dickinson, is terrifying as a character who uses a baby-girl voice to mask a surprising agenda.
The film keeps hinting at the possibility of supernatural elements, leading up to a final choice that’s bound to be divisive, and popular among certain niche fetish communities.
Stewart, an out lesbian for years, played the media like a fiddle in the leadup to the film, posing for a sexily androgynous cover for Rolling Stone and drawing the rage of certain right-wingers angry that “wokeness” had ruined the girl they thought was cute back when she made the Twilight movies. However, this isn’t a Madame Web situation where the star’s press tour was more memorable than the movie. Love Lies Bleeding is a thriller that isn’t afraid to get nasty.