Stream It Or Skip It: A24’s ‘Love Lies Bleeding’ on Max, a Deliriously Deranged and Horny Queer Noir Starring Kristen Stewart

I think director Rose Glass has created a new subgenre with Love Lies Bleeding (now streaming on Max): Queer noir. Glass’ horror outing Saint Maud was an effective, frequently crazy-good feature debut, and her sophomore effort ups the ante with a beefier budget and a cast that includes an inspired Kristen Stewart, a full-nutso Ed Harris and a breakthrough performance from Katy O’Brian (who we saw in small roles in The Mandalorian and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania). Right off the bat, the movie reeks of style, sweat and uberviolence, and we, of course, are always game for such things.

LOVE LIES BLEEDING: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: We meet Lou (Stewart) while she’s deep-fisting a toilet. No, really. Something’s jammed way in there, and she’s in past her elbow. We can’t see for sure, but I think it’s a feminine hygiene product, because the water is all bloody. And her co-worker Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov) seems really into it. Eyes wide. Turned on. She’s practically all over Lou in the bathroom of the Crater Gym, a name that tells us this story is set in a place that was once rendered a wasteland by a meteor. Anyway. Lou is a pragmatic, sullen misanthrope, and Daisy is just too… needy. Yuck! Lou lies that she can’t go out tonight and locks up and goes home to her cat and TV dinner and beer and stop-smoking cassette and a masturbation session on the grubby old couch. It’s 1989. Jesus effing Cripes is it 1989. And she smokes anyway. Stupid lousy useless self-help nonsense.

Next we meet Jackie (O’Brian) in the back of a car with a greasy mustache grunting on her back. The mustache is JJ (Dave Franco), who’s getting a piece of Jackie in exchange for getting her a job at the Louville Gun Range. It’s probably not worth noting that JJ has a mullet that looks like four or five rat tails lined up at said range for an execution, but I noted it anyway. She sleeps under the overpass and he goes home to his wife and kids and the next day she starts doing whatever, this and that, at the range, owned by Lou Sr. (Harris), who has what can only be described as the nuclear warhead of skullets. It’s just majestic, beyond the pale. Yes, Lou Sr. is father to Lou, and JJ is married to his other daughter, Beth (Jena Malone), who’s always battered and bruised, and I’m pretty sure she didn’t just run into a doorknob or fall down the steps.

You’ll notice Jackie is cut. Veins and tendons bulging everywhere. She pulls and presses at Crater Gym and Lou hits her with a long, hot gaze. Jackie feels it. How could she not? A horny beefhead accosts them in the parking lot and he ends up with a busted nose. They retreat back into the gym and Lou learns Jackie is drifting her way to Vegas for a bodybuilding competition. Lou asks if Jackie wants some steroids and Jackie says yes and Lou draws the liquid into the syringe. “Where you want it?” Lou asks and Jackie says “In the butt.” Then they start making out and before long it’s chow time, baby.

There are developments here. The FBI snoops around asking about Lou’s mom, who she hasn’t seen in a dozen years. Lou Sr. has a huge house and a creepy-ass insect collection and appears to be some sort of scumbag who smuggles guns over the border to Mexico. Jackie sticks around and she pulls her bodybuilding poses in the living room while Lou turns to goo. Soon enough, Lou’s making Jackie omelets without the egg yolks because that’s the fatty part. The whites have all the protein, yo. She keeps providing the steroids, too. One day Lou gets a call and learns that JJ put her dear sister Beth in the hospital this time, all swollen and comatose. “This guy,” she says choking with rage, “I wanna… I wanna do really f—ing bad.” Jackie hops in the truck and drives to JJ’s house and quite literally hulks out and turns his face into tapioca. She stands up and is practically hitting her head on the ceiling. Whoops. Too many ’roids.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Love Lies Bleeding – amazing title, by the way – is like Thelma and Louise if the Coen Bros. directed it and made it gay as hell, and indulged in a little light David Lynchism. (It’d make a perfect double-feature with Ethan Coen’s Drive-Away Dolls, actually.)

Performance Worth Watching: This really feels like the beginning of O’Brian’s movie-star career. She’s got true charisma and depth and presence. 

Memorable Dialogue: Jackie: “Don’t ever fall in love, OK? It really hurts.”

Sex and Skin: Oh boy. Inside, outside, upside-down.

Our Take: Love has rarely seemed so simultaneously hopeful and hopeless as it is in Love Lies Bleeding. One of the side effects of steroid use is enlargement of the heart, invisible symbolism that shouldn’t go unnoticed in Glass’ wildly gross, beautifully violent, sublimely tender romance about two tough ladies who have absolutely nowhere to go in nineteen-eighty-effing-nine. Jackie has big dreams of winning the competition and moving her and Lou out to the California beach and getting a job as a trainer so they can live out their lives in bliss, and it’s a dream coated in dingy neon and dust, all visual scuzz and period kitsch, and you get the sinking feeling it ain’t ever gonna happen. The film is immersive and funny, walking up to the chasm of obnoxiousness and looking over the edge and hocking a chunky loog down there without throwing itself in.  And the key performances are on point, especially Stewart, who leans into the prickly eccentricities of a woman long unable to pull herself from the quicksand of depression.

Is the film about anything more than its own tone and style and gloriously tweaked deference to B-movies past? It doesn’t need to be. But it is, and it’s a wily-smart depiction of desperate, desperate romance set against a backdrop of the stifling state of circa-’89 LGBTism – minus the conspicuous political overstatements of many well-meaning modern films (a trend that’s beginning to wane, thankfully). That anxiety and despair bubbles under the surface as Glass puts her pockmarked protagonists in a convertible on the gravelly road to Hell and drops a brick on the accelerator, indulging moments of putrid surrealism and hallucinatory violence, eventually taking the plot to the frayed ends of sanity. And of course the ending is really extra super f—ed. I loved it. 

Our Call: ROID RAGE!!!!!!! STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.