Unlike the harrowingly exquisite Saint Maud, Rose Glass’s second feature film, Love Lies Bleeding, is just as likely to make you giggle as it is to make you gasp. Lena Wilson reviews Love Lies Bleeding.
Read an excerpt from our interview wtih Rose Glass on Saint Maud. Read an excerpt of our essay on Kristen Stewart’s performance in Personal Shopper.
Our Rose Glass interview and Kristen Stewart essay are available to read in full in our ebook Beyond Empowertainment: Feminist Horror and The Struggle For Female Agency.
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If you were a convert for Rose Glass’s first film, Saint Maud, you might expect the writer-director’s sophomore feature, Love Lies Bleeding, to be another nihilistic exercise. Saint Maud ends with its probably-closeted, traumatized protagonist — spoiler alert — horrifically self-immolating; the headlines out of Sundance about Love Lies Bleeding emphasized gore galore. You’d be justified in thinking that leads Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian are headed for a bad romance. They are. They’re also impeccable players in a wry, drug-fueled thriller where the obsessive rush of first love is the real narcotic.
Stewart plays Lou, a grown-up tomboy floundering in her barren southwestern town in the 1980s. When not smoking along to cigarette-cessation tapes, she spends her days unclogging toilets and dodging advances from a yellow-toothed local named Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov). Enter Jackie (O’Brian), a runaway and aspiring competitive bodybuilder who stops Lou in her tracks. Lou gets Jackie hooked on anabolic steroids and the two daydream about Jackie’s upcoming competition in Las Vegas.
But devotion turns monstrous when Jackie commits a feral act of revenge. Suddenly, Lou and Jackie are at the top of a career criminal’s hit list. Further complicating things, the bad guy in question is Lou’s dad, Lou Sr. (Ed Harris). As Lou Sr. pulls Jackie into his murderous underworld and Lou tries to clean up Jackie’s mess, they both must do awful things to stay alive — and stay together.
Love Lies Bleeding review: hopeless, not heartless
The film’s title is your first hint that Glass and her co-writer, Weronika Tofilska, put ample thought and care into this story of well-intentioned martyrdom. Love-lies-bleeding is the common name for Amaranthus caudatus, an edible flowering plant that can withstand droughts once established in sandy soil. In the Victorian language of flowers, it means “hopeless, not heartless.” It may have even conveyed self-sacrifice as an act of pure love, à la Jesus Christ dying on the cross.
Both Saint Maud and Love Lies Bleeding are about women barely surviving in a culture that won’t love them back. Maud is left to weather serious trauma alone, and Lou and Jackie are two misfits unwelcome in their hometowns. Derided as the local dyke, Lou has zero friends outside of her cat, Happy Meal. Her complicated relationship with her family keeps her from moving somewhere more welcoming, even though she wants to. Jackie shacks up with Lou after their first dalliance because they’re hooked on each other, but also because she is literally homeless. It’s no accident that the film’s trailer features “Smalltown Boy,” a period-appropriate song about a gay runaway. These women have been starving for love their whole lives, so you can’t blame them for becoming gluttons once they find it in each other.
The self-sacrificial love underpinning Jackie and Lou’s relationship is the codependent axle on which this whole plot spins, but theirs isn’t the only doomed devotion in Love Lies Bleeding. Lou is nothing if not a drought-resistant flower, planted firmly to wait out her older sister, Beth (Jena Malone), who’s firmly in denial about her abusive marriage. Both women were raised by a violent arms dealer, and their mother suspiciously disappeared years ago.
Rose Glass mines tragedy for comedy
Still, Glass mines tragedy for comedy, sprinkling everything with dark whimsy. Our supervillain, Lou Sr., is an insectophile who runs a gun range. He shares his first scene with a pet larva the size of a chocolate éclair. We see Lou reading Macho Sluts by Pat Califia, a controversial collection of, in Califia’s own words, “lesbian pornography.” At a very inconvenient time, Happy Meal develops a taste for blood.
O’Brian is a revelation, but Stewart is probably Glass’s most valuable asset in this tonal balancing act. Anyone who thinks Kristen Stewart is a one-note performer simply hasn’t been paying enough attention to her. Love Lies Bleeding is consummate proof of her range. She imbues Lou with hilarious contradictions, offsetting her natural swagger with palpable anxiety. Lou is aware of her appeal and unabashed about her sexuality, traits that the naturally charming Stewart could pull off in her sleep.
Get our ebook Beyond Empowertainment, which features an interview with Rose Glass (on Saint Maud) and an analysis of Kristen Stewart as a performer.
Stewart really makes her character come alive when the shit hits the fan, pitching her voice higher and acting twitchy under interrogation. She treats her sister with the same protective ferocity one might find in a rescue chihuahua. And, of course, Stewart’s aptitude for deadpan humour plays fabulously here. Lou reacts to mangled dead bodies like an exasperated housekeeper. (So many blood stains!) While trying to intimidate her career criminal father, she answers him with a perfectly timed, somehow emotionally complex, “Yep.”
Lou is most dynamic with Jackie, her complement — the short masc to her tall femme. Their size difference is played for maximum entertainment — and eroticism — as our tiny tomboy tries, on several occasions, to climb her lover like a tree. On the graver end of things, as Jackie grows more unhinged due to the effects of the steroids, Lou struggles even harder to pretend like everything is fine. The worse Jackie gets, the more Lou fights to keep her. She’s more like her sister than she realizes.
With all the romance of Desert Hearts and all the homoerotic crime of Thelma and Louise, Love Lies Bleeding offers a new spin on the female-centred Western. As fatalistic fidelity gives way to chaos, Glass crafts an aesthetically precise, peerless tale of vengeance, obsession, and delusion. You have no choice but to lean back and enjoy the ride.
After all, isn’t love just delusion with its seatbelt on?
Related reading/listening to our review of Rose Glass’s Love Lies Bleeding
More Rose Glass: Read an excerpt from our interview with Rose Glass on her first film, Saint Maud. The full interview is available in the ebook Beyond Empowertainment: Feminist Horror and The Struggle for Female Agency.
More Kristen Stewart: Read an excerpt from our essay on Kristen Stewart’s performance in Personal Shopper. The full interview is available in the ebook Beyond Empowertainment: Feminist Horror and The Struggle for Female Agency.
More women-centred westerns. Read about Kelly Reichardt’s women-centred Westerns in our ebook Roads to Nowhere: Kelly Reichardt’s Broken American Dreams. We discuss the book on the podcast here. Listen to our podcast discussion of Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff and how it subverts the Western. Listen to our podcast on Australian woman-centred Western The Dressmaker.