Love Lies Bleeding Is the Punk Rock Queer Love Story You’ve Been Waiting For [Review]

There’s something very powerful about a muscular woman on film. Maybe that’s because it’s so rare for a woman’s physique to be celebrated.

Love Lies Bleeding is the new movie from director Rose Glass and stars Kristen Stewart as burnt-out gym manager Lou and Katy M. O’Brian as a drifting body builder with dreams of being a Vegas champion. Love Lies Bleeding doesn’t just showcase female muscles – it’s obsessed with them. Set in the 1980s, Glass’ camera voyages across O’Brian’s ripped body like it’s Stallone’s as he hosed down Soviets with a machine gun – one character even calls Jackie “Rambo.” But those muscley movies were made for dudes, and the fetishization of their stars’ physiques was always countered by violence, lest they be accused of the most common playground insult of the ’80s and ’90s.

Well, Love Lies Bleeding is both brutally violent and gay as hell, but the violence isn’t used to hide the movie’s sexuality. As someone who gets emotional just thinking about Portrait of a Lady on Fire, it’s gratifying to see a movie about a lesbian couple who don’t have to hide who they are from the audience. These girls get intimate in increasingly explicit sex scenes that have no time for the steamy eroticism of the ’80s and ’90s.

If Love Lies Bleeding were nothing more than a story of two gym enthusiasts hooking up in the ’80s, it would still be worth checking out, but there’s so much more to it than that. This is, and the marketing material hasn’t properly conveyed this, a Cohen Brothers-esque crime movie with low stakes but high emotion. The characters are loveable but ridiculous enough that you don’t mind too much when their jaws are ripped off. This might be one of the more successful riffs on Fargo I’ve seen because it manages to be funny, shocking, and surprisingly profound, all in the space of a single scene.

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For all the poppy trailers and interviews about how hot Stewart and O’Brian are, this is directed by the woman who made Saint Maude, a harrowing tale about how loneliness and ego can metastasize into mental illness. I was not expecting a movie that features Dave Franco in a truly horrific mullet to make me reflect on codependency and the cycle of abuse, but here we are.

Some of the abuse in the movie is represented by Ed Harris, here playing Lou’s dad as a walking skull with a mullet. Harris has portrayed sinister but oddly likable villains since The Rock, and his voice is getting scarier as he ages. Glass knows that even a brief shot of his face bathed in red light is enough to remind us how dangerous he is. And if we forget, Stewart is there to remind us.

Stewart is one of the great “reactors” of her generation, and Glass loves to watch her watch people. The first time Jackie and Lou see each other across the gym is a meet-cute for the ages, and Stewart communicates as much with a lip bite or sardonic laugh as a monologue. There’s no denying Stewart is an ace project picker – Love Lies sits on the same pedestal of weird and well-made films as Personal Shopper, Crimes of the Future, and Spencer.

But you can’t take your eyes off O’Brian. Not only is her body breathtaking, but she’s taken notes from Stewart in communicating a ton through her eyes and how she breathes. Her performance of the bodybuilding routine late in the film is as thrilling as any action sequence. Glass even plays with perspective a few times to skewer superhero imagery, one of the many ways she plays with pop culture expectations.

There’s so much in Love Lies Bleeding that is surprising, funny, and entertaining. A unique vision executed this well is what the movies are all about.

Love Lies Bleeding hits theaters on Mar. 12.