Lou (Kristen Stewart, never better), sporting a greasy mullet and greasier tank top, spends her days unclogging toilets and working the desk at a gym in the middle of a lawless, scorched-earth, gun-worshipping town in ‘80s New Mexico. Jackie (Katy O’Brian, a revelation) is a fearless bodybuilder sleeping rough and hitchhiking her way to Las Vegas for a competition that could change her life. When the latter breezes into Lou’s gym, the connection between two lost souls on the fringes of Americana is immediate, dizzying, and scorchingly hot.
It takes no time at all for these two to drag each other into a vortex of throbbing desire, steroid-addled mania, haunting familial trauma (courtesy of Ed Harris as Lou’s hideously coiffed, bug-eating, gun-running father), bone-crunching violence and a yonic canyon bloated with a mounting number of corpses.
The bones of writer-director and Saint Maud filmmaker Rose Glass’s second feature are deceptively basic. Much like a tornado that gathers strength from destruction, Love Lies Bleeding amasses a multitude of genres, themes, and emotions into an unstoppable force. Wildly swinging from small-town crime caper to neo-noir thriller, from magical realism to sapphic eroticism, from body horror to situational comedy – even when all the pieces don’t quite connect, you cannot help but be swept up in the slyly funny, horny, frantic, dirty, and plain-fucking-weird potency of this unmissable film.
One piece of advice: do your best to see this one with an audience. It’s a real bonding experience.
Love Lies Bleeding releases in US cinemas from March 8th, and UK cinemas from May 3rd, 2024. Watch the trailer here.
