Love Lies Bleeding

Rose Glass's latest locates the intersection of the monstrous and the human. (Plus, we announce the winner of our Oppenheimer giveaway!)

Katy O’Brian and Kristen Stewart in Love Lies Bleeding. Image courtesy of A24.

A bodybuilding drifter named Jackie (Katy O’Brian) comes to town, bringing the ache of her hunger with her; when she meets gym owner Lou (Kristin Stewart), she finds immediate attraction, but along with it the pain of family ties and of Lou’s helplessness in the face of spiritual and moral rot.

Director Rose Glass understands the importance of the human body: its resilience, its fragility, the way that existing in a specific kind of body can mean the difference between companionship and alienation. This understanding is apparent from the very first shot of her new film, Love Lies Bleeding—a shot that doesn’t include any bodies in it at all. Red canyon walls frame the night sky like an open wound in the New Mexico night. There’s still some light—there are so many stars—but the light is far off, with huge spaces of emptiness between each point of light. Loneliness, woundedness, the search for someone to share human existence with—it’s all there, surrounded by a scar in the foundation of the earth.

Glass’s first film, Saint Maud, explores the broken psyche of a hospice worker who’s converted to an intensely ascetic form of Catholicism in the hopes that she can atone for a past sin. Love Lies Bleeding, which Glass cowrote with Weronika Tofilska, focuses on the physical as an expression of its characters’ existential questions. The film is no less spiritual for all its dedication to the here and now of what’s happening to the characters on screen. It’s beautifully, brutally efficient, communicating the stakes of the story in swift cuts, one after the other. A literal sign in the desert, warning against criminal activity, then evidence of the same crime being committed, guns stacked against one another like exclamation points, their physical presence the only exposition the movie needs.

The physical body is a preoccupation of the camera: the swell of Jackie’s biceps as she trains, the hollow eyes in Lou’s face, the way each character moves through the open desert space of the film. Lou is hiding from her past and from her criminal father (Ed Harris); she shrinks into herself until she meets Jackie, whose presence lets her forget her own self-loathing long enough for her spine to lose its defensive hunch. Jackie, for her part, moves with the confidence of a born liar, someone who needs to bluff her way across the country and into a job that can keep her own body together long enough for her to make it to a bodybuilding competition in Las Vegas. She doesn’t know what she’ll do after that. The American dream: the chance to reshape yourself into a new image, one that celebrates youth and vitality and that will bring you money and fame and the chance to escape whatever demons may be chasing you from your past. The dream sours, because you can’t escape yourself.

Lou and Jackie find love. They choose each other, again and again, despite each others’ pasts, hang-ups, and stupid mistakes. Stewart and O’Brian make that relationship believable, settling into the easy groove of attraction and sex in a way that doesn’t sand down their spiky edges. When violence blossoms in the desert, the decision to commit it, then to cover it up, makes sense with the finality of Greek tragedy. Both characters are made larger and smaller by their actions, more human and more monstrous, a perfect fit for each other and their pitiless world. —Sarah Welch-Larson

★★★★

Love Lies Bleeding is out now.

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