Movie Review : Love Lies Bleeding (2024)
Movies have been lying to us about love. They've been selling it as an all-encompassing and widely available cure for human suffering if only we knew where to look. But Trent Reznor said it best: love is not enough. It's a powerful, but broken and jagged tool that can create bliss as easily as it can kill. Rose Glass' new movie Love Lies Bleeding explores that jagged, imperfect nature of the flagship emotion for the human spirit through a steamy, sexy and somehow crummy LGBTQ+ neo-noir thriller and it's kind of great?
Love Lies Bleeding tells the story of Louise Langston (Kristin Stewart), daughter of a local mobster appropriately named Lou Langston (Ed Harris) who lives a crummy, dead end existence as the manager of one of his father's businesses until the day she meets a young bodybuilder named Jackie (Katy O’Brian). They fall hopelessly in love, Louise gifts steroids to Jackie to help her with a bodybuilding competition and when Louise's abusive family catches up with her, angry, roided up Jackie gets in the way.
The Invisible Albatross of Love
This is a brutally honest love movie before it is anything else. All the sex and violence (and there's a lot of it) are accessory to the point Rose Glass and her co-screenwriter Weronika Tofilska are trying to make: love is commitment and commitment takes courage. Not everyone has the courage to honor their feelings. Falling for Jackie reveals Louise to herself. Living a grey and moribund life with few pleasures, Jackie offers her first moment of clarity. For the first time, the colors black and white appear in Louise's heart.
Being close to emotionally illiterate, Louise offers steroids to Jackie as a token of her feelings, which turns out both good and bad for her. It transformed her lover into a wrecking machine capable of protecting her from creepy, abusive dad, but it also stripped Jackie of her sweetness and agency. Louise's gesture is both a success and a mistake and that, my friends, feels real. While love brought clarity to Louise, her actions highlight another problem movies often fail to: relationships are ephemeral. Even the good ones.
The genius of Love Lies Bleeding is being a completely and assumedly unrealistic movie that depicts ugly and difficult emotional truths with unwavering realism. It feels unfulfilling, but insanely relatable too. It also explores how deterministic romantic relationships can be. Before meeting Jackie, Louise was basically an instrument of her father's will and the powerful emotional change that it causes in Louise makes her believe she can challenge that borderline enslavement she's been living for so many years.
All the best reasons to like this movie aren't visible on screen, but I assure you they are there if you know where to look.
There’s Something About Jackie
Another smart detail about Love Lies Bleeding that makes it more interesting than your quintessential revenge thriller is that Jackie is both a person and an idea. I believe that's why Rose Glass dipped her toes into surrealism here and there once she was on screen (those who have seen that ending know what I mean). Jackie's ripped and strong and reflects a power inside Louise that she didn't know she had. Jackie does most of the violent stuff in Love Lies Bleeding, but it's Louise who enables it.
Louise is attracted to Jackie because choosing her is the first deliberate choice she makes that goes against the bleak order of her life. She empowers herself by choosing a powerful woman to be at her side. It’s why their love story feels so strong and visceral on screen. Jackie is both real and not. Independently of who she is and what she chooses to do, she has liberated something inside Louise that'll allow her to be her own person from now on and that's what being in love is all about. At least, in my opinion.
*
Love Lies Bleeding is a very good film. Perhaps not a transcendent one, but it has a boldness and an organic charm that’ll warrant a couple viewings at least. I predict it's going to age well. It's grimy and violent in a way many other movies are, but it has life-affirming qualities that these other movies don’t have. Rose Glass is on the verge of something big, I can feel it. She's mastered different tones and styles of storytelling. I'm ready to watch the movie she really wants to make. I know she has one in the chamber.
