In the Flesh: Love Lies Bleeding

Are there weaknesses in Rose Glass’s sophomore picture? Yes. Does its reach exceed the grasp of its special effects from time to time? Sure. It’s not a perfect movie, not the kind of thing you could call a masterpiece. Shot composition is often a little hinky, and it could really stand an injection of color, but my God, it’s a banger anyway. Kristen Stewart has never in her life been hotter than she is here as Lou, a sleazy, chain-smoking dirtbag dyke plunging toilets and wiping down benches in a cruddy Texas town when runaway bodybuilder Jackie (Katy O’Brian) walks into her life. The pair’s chemistry is immediate and intense, a toxic slurry of repressed emotions, desperate need, sublimated violent impulses, and chemically exacerbated disorders. It’s captivating, and the sexual charge between the two women is so overwhelming you can almost smell the sweat and vaginal discharge. Love Lies Bleeding is horny. Insanely horny. God-tier horny. Lou sucking on Jackie’s toes as the two of them lie giggling and bickering in a doorway is going to live rent-free in my head for who knows how long. Pussy sniffing, a cameo by Pat Califia’s Macho Sluts, a hallucinatory scene ripped straight out of a giantess fetish comic, O’Brian’s rippling muscles and astonishing poise and flexibility — it’s a movie by and for the world’s dyke perverts.

Thematically, Glass’s film is concerned with the near-universal human knack for wanting people and things we know are bad for us. Beth’s (Jena Malone) hysterical loyalty to her godawful abusive husband J.J. (Dave Franco), Lou’s loyalty to first the brainwashed Beth and then the violent, impulsive Jackie, from the minute Lou lights up while playing a tape meant to help people quit smoking, the agenda’s on full display. We love poisoning ourselves. We love hurting ourselves, and being hurt by the people we want and love. See how Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov) hurls herself at Lou again and again, longing for someone who treats her like obnoxious garbage. Watch Lou beg and plead with Jackie after Jackie headbutts her in the face in a moment of steroid-induced rage and confusion. Hell, Lou can’t even quit working for her murdering shitbag father, Lou Senior (Ed Harris), stuck at a dead-end job in a gym he owns after leaving his gun-running gang. Even after killing people at her old man’s side, something which clearly scarred her deeply, Lou still hangs around like a kicked dog. She might scorn Beth’s simpering devotion to J.J., but in the end she runs away into the sunset with a woman who’s already hit her once. That’s without mentioning the bullet Jackie puts in Daisy’s head, which doesn’t quite do the job (Lou has to pinch-hit by strangling the half-dead girl in the film’s final moments), but the intent is there.

Love Lies Bleeding is mean. It’s squalid. It features Ed Harris eating a huge, exotic beetle alive in a fit of rage and shots of Jackie’s muscles in motion that are equal parts worshipful and dehumanized, architectural and sexual. There is a tremendous amount of anxiety, sensuality, and raw lust at work in Glass’s framing of women’s bodies. The undercurrent of body dysmorphia is clear in every subtly or not so subtly distorted face the tweaking Jackie sees (the huge, doll-like eyes are a particularly effective visual flourish, as are the horrible potato mask faces of the women Jackie imagines mocking her when she vomits in the middle of her routine) during her ill-fated trip to Vegas. Even feeling good is just something that comes before feeling bad, a Sartre-esque state of nausea that lies at the end of all human connection. “Never fall in love,” a broken and terrified Jackie sobs over the phone to her adopted sibling. “It just hurts really bad.” You can feel it, man. It’s a wild, weird, slimy, sexy movie made straight from the gut, and I hope Glass gets to make twenty more like it.