Love Lies Bleeding (2024) FULL MOVIE REACTION

I love how complex the characters are in this and how the movie doesn't choose the more typical story beats. Like the fact that Lou has a bad relationship with her dad but it's not because he's homophobic, it would have been so easy to make that the conflict, especially with this being set in the 80's but nope, queer people can have strained relationships with our parents for a bunch of other reasons. I also love how Lou IS a lot like her dad, right down to her telling Jackie to stay and do nothing and her dad saying the same thing to her. I love that the last we see of Beth is her being hateful and cruel towards her sister, she's more than just the "battered wife" and it's a good depiction of the theme of addiction that runs through the movie, how every character keeps coming back to something that's bad for them. I wasn't familiar with Katy O'Brian before this movie but this performance made me want to see her in EVERYTHING going forward, she's an absolute star (and GORGEOUS, like she made me question a few things about my sexuality). I thought it was really interesting that this movie didn't glamorize the violence like a lot of other crime thrillers do, it was UPSETTING to look at here. I love that we're getting queer stories like this more frequently now, ones with messy, flawed characters, ones that don't have to be all about the hardships of our queerness and just more genre-heavy ones. Give me gay spacemen, lesbian pirates, trans horror heroes. Fun fact: this is the director's (Rose Glass) second movie and she said that people kept pushing for her to make a "strong female character" movie so she just said "Okay, I'll make one about a bodybuilder." I saw someone's interpretation of the ending being that Jackie growing was representative of her true strength because it came from the love between the two of them rather than the steroids.

Andrew