Love Lies Bleeding – Movie Review (3/5)

LOVE LIES BLEEDING is a crime thriller by the amazing filmmaker Rose Glass. The movie stars Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian while the plot is an action-fueled crazy and steamy wild ride. Read our full Love Lies Bleeding movie review here!

LOVE LIES BLEEDING is a movie by Rose Glass and this immediately led me to have extremely great expectations. So much that I am afraid I may have ruined it a little bit for myself. After all, I also love both Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian, who star in this movie, and I’m a gay girl.

So I’ll do my best to put this aside and focus on the actual movie rather than my expectations. Fortunately, I am more than capable of seeing the many qualities of this movie. It definitely is a crazy ride with a wild ending!

Continue reading our Love Lies Bleeding movie review below. It’s out on VOD from April 26, 2024.

A different kind of love story

Love Lies Bleeding may be an action-fueled crazy crime thriller but it’s also a very simple love story. In fact, maybe it’s even too simple for me in the sense that it moves too fast. I admit I can be difficult in that sense. Woo me a little, would ya?!

But this movie is not that kind of story.

Hell, the world it plays out in doesn’t have room for any of that.

It’s a lot more to the point and extreme. Also, it takes place in the final days of the 1980s.

We meet the reclusive gym manager, Lou (Kristen Stewart) who falls hard for Jackie (Katy O’Brian). We don’t know much about Jackie, who has just arrived in town. However, she is clearly an ambitious bodybuilder and we quickly come to learn that she is heading to Las Vegas to win a bodybuilding competition.

The step after that is Hollywood. In Jackie’s mind, anyway. Lou is crazy about Jackie, so she’s quick to offer a little needle and some “gym candy” to help Jackie get bigger. Fast. Once Lou starts shooting up Jackie with roids, there are some side effects as well.

This combined with everything else going on in the small town, run by Lou’s criminal family, results in their love igniting violence. Even murder!

Not for the male gaze

For Love Lies Bleeding, we’re getting a very different kind of love story. One that is electric with an attraction between characters that can be felt through the screen. Yes, Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian were definitely perfect casting choices for this one. From the second their eyes meet, you should be able to recognize the sparks flying.

The scenes between these two were clearly not created for the male gaze. I know many hear “lesbians” and think it’s to get the straight male audience to tune in. Well, Love Lies Bleeding was not built for this. Hell, I think many straight men will have a hard time even wrapping their minds around what goes where and why. But maybe I’m wrong about that.

Still, getting Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian to portray these characters – both are LGBTQ – should tell you something. They know what they’re doing.

Hell, the entire cast was brilliant with Jena Malone as the sister of Kristen Stewart’s character. Also, Dave Franco as the abusive husband of Jena Malone’s character was a solid choice. As was, of course, Ed Harris as the father of the two sisters. His character is a criminal who has no conscience, it seems, and will stop at nothing.

Including not stepping in when his son-in-law, who works for him, is constantly beating up his own daughter. Oh yeah, it is a damn dark world, we’re introduced to in Love Lies Bleeding. Everyone is both good and bad. There are no exceptions really, and this is exactly what I love about i.e. South Korean storytelling.

Watch Love Lies Bleeding on VOD now!

Rose Glass is the director of this movie and I adored her previous movie Saint Maud (2019). That one hit me in a way that few movies do, which is why my expectations for Love Lies Bleeding were probably out of wack. For this new movie, Rose Glass co-wrote the screenplay with Weronika Tofilska, who worked on Baby Reindeer most recently (as a director).

Everything about this movie seemed tailor-made for me; A wild genre-hybrid by a filmmaker I adore and with a cast full of actors I love. What could go wrong? Well, I can’t claim that anything did go wrong, but I just expected something different, which did affect my film-watching experience.

Having said all this, I would recommend it to everyone who likes genre hybrids. Especially anyone who also loves it when a movie evolves in crazy ways that go above and beyond what you’d expect.

LOVE LIES BLEEDING is out on VOD from April 26, 2024.

Details

Director: Rose Glass
Writers: Rose Glass and Weronika Tofilska
Cast: Kristen Stewart, Katy O’Brian, Jena Malone, Anna Baryshnikov, Dave Franco, Ed Harris