Movie Review: 'Love Lies Bleeding'

Love Lies Bleeding (2024)

Directed by Rose Glass

Written by Rose Glass, Weronika Tofiska

Starring Kristen Stewart, Katy O'Brien, Ed Harris, Jena Malone, Dave Franco

Release Date March 15th, 2024

Published March 18th, 2024

How does one describe the new romantic thriller, Love Lies Bleeding? It's highly unconventional. It's not what you are expecting. It's a film that defies genre and, really, any simple classification. It's a love story, a romance, a sexy thriller, and a deeply haunted and haunting film about crime, violence, sex, and death. It's a movie that ends on a note of whimsical imagination and curdled darkness that I cannot begin to spoil or describe properly.

Love Lies Bleeding, at its most base description, stars Kristen Stewart as Lou, a gym employee whose life consists of cleaning toilets, ignoring complaining customers, and worrying desperately for her older sister, Beth (Jena Malone), who lives in a state of chaos due to the abuse of her negligent, cheating husband, J.J (Dave Franco). Also hanging over Lou's existence is her father, Lou Sr. (Ed Harris), a wealthy criminal who runs a criminal empire built on guns and death.

Lou's life is changed forever by the arrival of Jackie (Katy O'Brien), a bodybuilder, who is thumbing her way to Las Vegas for a bodybuilding competition. In need of money, Jackie accepts a job working as a waitress at a bar owned by Lou's father. Jackie got the job via J.J and you can imagine how that meeting went down for yourself considering what you know about J.J from my previous description. Lou meets Jackie when Jackie comes to work out at the gym and the two spark immediately.

Finding that Jackie has no place to stay, Lou opens her home to her. The two begin a romantic relationship but there is a very obvious roadblock coming. Lou's dad and J.J complicate and loom over the potential happily ever after for our two female heroes. That said, there is also Jackie's developing dependance on steroids, something introduced to her by Lou, via the gym, and Lou's devotion to her sister, that add extra weight and tension to how the pair may or may not make it out of this dead end town.

Directed by Rose Glass, the acclaimed director of Saint Maud, Love Lies Bleeding features hot sex, crazy violence and bloodshed, and a central performance by Kristen Stewart that manages to keep the whole thing together as it threatens to jump the tracks. Love Lies Bleeding comes perilously close to disaster. It could turn into parody or complete chaos and that's part of the charm of the movie. It's the artists that take the biggest risks who reap the greatest rewards and Rose Glass takes big risks in Love Lies Bleeding, all of it paying off with a movie you can't pull your eyes away from.

The sex is sweat soaked and torrid, the violence is bloody and sudden, and the characters are equally riveting. A big shout out goes to Ed Harris whose bizarre skullet hairsyle and craggy face make him look like some kind of dangerous alien lizard. His eyes are terrifying in the coldness of his stare. He's menacing in every scene, in every way, but he has a way of remaining menacing, even in what should be less tense moments and that means your anxiously clenching your muscles to cope whenever he's on screen. It's an award-worthy supporting performance.

But, the central and most exciting aspect of Love Lies Bleeding are the big swinging chances that the movie takes. There is a choice to highlight the bodybuilding and Jackie's growing delusions related to her use of heavy amounts of drugs. I won't spoil it here but it's a big choice and if the audience rejects it, the whole movie could sink. I loved the choice, I was in awe of the choice, and thus, I really loved Love Lies Bleeding. It's not a movie I want to see again anytime soon, it's way to pitch black for multiple viewings, but it's a really good watch one time, nevertheless.

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