SUNDANCE 2024: ‘Love Lies Bleeding’ Is A Ferocious Look At Romance

Love Lies Bleeding is one of the most anticipated films of the year, thanks to its gorgeously compelling leads, Kristen Stewart and Katy M. O’Brian. As director, Rose Glass‘s sophomore film, Love Lies Bleeding, is a follow-up to her acclaimed debut Saint Maud. While the two look like polar opposites on the surface, deep down, Glass remains concerned about women, love, and the transformative nature of it, with Weronika Tofilska also serving as a co-writer of the film.

In the film, reclusive gym manager Lou (Kristen Stewart) falls hard for Jackie (Katy O’Brian), an ambitious bodybuilder headed through town to Las Vegas in pursuit of her dream. But their love ignites violence, pulling them deep into the web of Lou’s criminal family headed by patriarch Lou Sr. (Ed Harris) and shifting the film from a pure romance into a crime drama that accelerates with each subsequent choice.

Love Lies Bleeding is a viscerally crafted romance. Glass uses violence and genre-bending elements to highlight just how deeply loving someone changes you and how it uncovers the parts of yourself that you want to hide. There is never a part in the film where violence is done just for shock or for the sake of the act. Every time it happens is tied directly to how each woman unlocks different parts of themselves.

Lou and Jackie love each other with a riveting intensity. In the beginning, it’s passionate intimacy. As the film continues, it morphs with each woman finding her respective power by embracing things about themselves they’ve previously hidden. Love Lies Bleeding offers retribution and power for its leads, but it’s hard-won. At the start of their relationship, the two are mysterious to the audience and each other.

Jackie is new to New Mexico and has no one. She used her body to find a job and ultimately became homeless but focused on one singular goal: winning a bodybuilding competition in Las Vegas. She’s gorgeous and muscular, and her past is a mystery. Love loves her sister, hates Beth (Jena Malone), her sister’s abusive husband JJ (Dave Franco), and refuses to talk to her father. Their strained relationship doesn’t happen because she’s a lesbian. It’s something deeper and more troubling. Lou is in control of her life and deeply angry that she can’t keep her sister from abuse and about who her father is.

Individually, Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian are powerhouses. Stewart has a commanding presence. She is calculating, cold, and capable of harm in a way that isn’t immediately noticeable. Lou, at first, seems quiet, scared, and scarred by the violence in her family. She’s visually weaker with a charismatic apathy. All of this before she changes into an intimidating force able to take a life or cover a crime without a second thought. Where Stewart’s Lou moves from something softer to more visceral, O’Brian’s Jackie is the opposite.

Physically strong and intimidating, Jackie’s violence seems natural. Immediately, she hits a man who touches her without her consent, keeping control. O’Brian’s performance begins self-assured and in control before she transforms into something more vulnerable and docile. Jackie feels everything deeply, and when she commits violence, it stains her.

Her conscience is present, and it sends her into a spiral. O’Brian’s performance is also important for another reason. A woman with a body type traditionally not idealized or lusted after in Hollywood is the beauty of the film. She is wanted, admired, and loved. She is sensitive and vulnerable and plays against the kind of attitude you would expect, given how women like her are stereotyped in society. O’Brian’s performance is astonishingly strong and solidifies the fact that she deserves more opportunities to succeed in roles moving forward.

Glass’s choice to play the two women against the audience’s assumptions is thoughtful and crafts a visceral response when the film takes harrowing turns. As we learn more about each of the women, we see that they’re hiding parts of themselves. The runtime continues, the women begin to reveal the parts of themselves that they have buried, and Love Lies Bleeding gets grittier. Its pacing increases under the pressure of a murder that the women are trying to hide. Their love is transformative, but not always for the better. They each tap into power and strength. To do so, they need to crack and disregard the person they claim to be.

Transformation through love is the core of the film. The magical and the ugly are both on display, but it’s love nonetheless. Lou and Jackie have to accept themselves to begin to accept each other. But the parts that surface are ugly, they’re dangerous, and they’re violent. The audience looks at their sins and sees them for the ugliness they hold, and yet the romance stays. It’s hard to root against Lou and Jackie, even as their approach becomes increasingly panicked, edging on unhinged. They are the monsters. That’s needed to rid the world of other uglier monsters in the process.

Stylistically, Love Lies Bleeding is beautifully muddied. The washed-out filter of the Southwest nods to crime dramas, while flashback dreams are bathed in a red glow that may be overused in other media but works expertly here. The fashion is perfect, the electric intimacy that Lou and Jackie share is a sight to behold, and ultimately, the film is a gritty kind of cool that shows Rose Glass’s ability to do more than just what we saw in her debut.

Rose Glass doesn’t keep Lou and Jackie as perfect for each other. At times, they’re terrible for each other and betray one another. The duo are still firmly tethered together, even in their betrayal. They kill for each other, they embrace each other, and they liberate each other too. While some may call Love Lies Bleeding ambitious, I call it sincere and intimate. The people we love shape who we are. They change us on a cellular level. Things can be beautiful or terrifying, but no matter the outcome, it’s still love. The film’s tenderness is what makes its violence all the more impactful.

Love Lies Bleeding is a carnal love story that allows its women to be hammers of retribution. They are each other’s saviors as much as they are the reason for each other’s pain. Love Lies Bleeding is a striking take on love with genre-bending eruptions in its fairly standard crime drama thrill. Rose Glass has a ferocious voice, and she continues to use it to center women as complicated, flawed, and powerful subjects.

Love Lies Bleeding premiered at Sundance 2024 and is playing now in theaters nationwide.