Berlinale 2024: Love Lies Bleeding
Love. Lou (Kristen Stewart), the reclusive manager of a gym in New Mexico, falls in love with Jackie (Katy O'Brian), a drifter with ambitions of becoming an acclaimed bodybuilder. Their attraction is instant, their passion fiery, and their love intense. However, all is not as it seems.
Lies. Unbeknownst to her, Jackie is working for Lou’s father, Lou Sr. (Ed Harris), owner of a gun range and criminal mogul with an attraction to bugs. Jackie got this job by having sex with JJ (Dave Franco), the husband of Lou’s sister, Beth (Jena Malone). Why Jackie came to this town and why she left her home in Oklahoma is a mystery. Lou is not without a dark past, as she spent her younger years aiding her father’s criminal activities before distancing herself from him. All of their skeletons will come out of the closet, challenging the love between Lou and Jackie.
Bleeding. Once the secrets are revealed, the train of violence has left the station and there is no way of stopping it now. The tragic histories of the central couple collide, creating a devastating path of blood and violence that will change the course of their lives forever.
Love Lies Bleeding is not only the name of an underrated Elton John song, but also the name of a plant, one with an oddly attractive form that is hard not to love. In the Victorian era, it symbolized hopeless love, not unlike that between Lou and Jackie.
Following the success of her feature debut, Saint Maud, British director Rose Glass is back with an inherently American tale of sex and violence set in a small desert town. The film plays like a blend of the Wachowski’s Bound, with how Lou and Jackie express their love and the minute attention to detail and foreshadowing, and David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, as the past comes back to haunt them leading to bloody confrontations.
It may sound like Love Lies Bleeding is a dark and dour film, but thankfully it is quite different from that. Glass injects a hefty dose of black comedy in the narrative, courtesy also of her precise direction, eliciting laughs from very simple cutaways to an actor’s facial expressions. The cast is also perfectly selected, as not a single performance feels fake.
Stewart channels her weirdest, twitchiest tendencies, playing a character that feels like an evolution of Timlin from Crimes of the Future. Harris once again plays a creepy villain, with a purposefully bizarre hairdo that rivals that of Mark Rylance in Bones & All. Both Franco and Malone do a good job in limited roles, as does Anna Baryshnikov as Daisy, Lou’s co-worker with an unhealthy obsession for her. But it is O’Brian who steals the film, delivering a revelatory performance as Jackie, balancing vulnerability and pure strength, with really expressive eyes that come to life in all of her close-ups. She is bound to become a star after this.
Amidst all of the pulpy genre fun that Rose Glass is having, the most commendable thing about Love Lies Bleeding that makes it an instant highlight in the first quarter of 2024 is its portrayal of lesbian love. At the press conference in Berlin, Stewart expressed the importance of a film like this, in which the characters’ queerness is not the sole focus of the narrative. Lou and Jackie have desires, dreams, and regrets. They feel real because, just like real people, they are more than just their sexuality, something that Bound already tackled yet very few mainstream films have since.
Gorgeously shot by Ben Fordesman and propelled by a Clint Mansell score that is both romantic and unsettling, Love Lies Bleeding is terrific, an engrossing and unhinged dark comedy-meets-neo-noir that is every bit as entertaining as one could hope for. But most importantly, it is unashamedly weird, violent, sexy, and hopeful, and hopefully, it leads to even more creative freedom for Rose Glass and her team.