"Love Lies Bleeding" - Film Review
There’s an unfortunate trope that exists about LGBT stories. One of the characters suffers a gruesome death, most often immediately after feeling comfortable in their sexuality for the first time. “Bury Your Gays,” as it has come to be known, is heavily documented. Autostraddle has created a handy infographic to explain the harmful breadth of this trope. Many people point to the CW’s The 100 and the death of Lexa (Alycia Debnam-Carey) as a watershed moment for LGBT representation in pop culture. We know what it feels like when the queer characters die, but what does it feel like to watch them live? To watch them get revenge on the world and the people who have wronged them? Love Lies Bleeding seeks to answer those questions.
Lou (Kristen Stewart) has built a boring routine in her small desert town. She works days at the local bodybuilding gym, has a beer and a microwavable meal for dinner, falls asleep, and does it again the next day. This routine and normalcy are in stark contrast to the past she’s running from. The FBI has been trying to arrest her father (Ed Harris) for a series of violent crimes that they can’t connect to him. It’s clear Lou knows something, but she wants to keep as much distance as possible between herself and her father. That becomes a little more difficult when bodybuilding hopeful and out-of-towner Jackie (Katy O'Brian) enters the picture. She’s been hitchhiking her way to Las Vegas and working odd jobs as she crosses the country. Her latest job is at Lou’s father’s gun range, working with Lou’s brother-in-law (Dave Franco). As Jackie and Lou’s relationship grows, Lou finds herself pulled back into her father’s crime-ridden world.
courtesy of a24
The sound design for the film is one of the most viscerally uncomfortable movie-going experiences since Julia Ducournau’s Titane. Love Lies Bleeding is auditory body horror that is not for the faint of heart. The audience’s skin crawls as Jackie flexes her black-market-steroid muscles, or as fits of violence burst onto the scene. The shots ringing out from the gun range (and that later spill into the surrounding area) are piercing reminders of the violence that always seems to follow Jackie and Lou. They’re completely surrounded by harshness, and the rage they must channel to reclaim their lives and their selves.
Director Rose Glass’ first feature, Saint Maud, was a horror story about religion and the thin line between possession and obsession. There are some thematic overlaps with Love Lies Bleeding. Her sophomore flick is interested in bodies and the ways people are able to (or unable to) control the body of someone else. Love Lies Bleeding sees Jackie and Lou disconnected from their bodies because they’re tools used by other people, except when the two are alone in Lou’s crapped, shitty apartment, wrapped in the bliss of domesticity. Even the violence in the film echoes this concern with bodies and what a person is capable of. Jackie says she isn’t interested in guns because she wants to know the strength of her own muscles. The power-hungry men around her love the feeling of a gun in their hands because it gives them brawn without the effort it takes to build muscles.
courtesy of a24
Love Lies Bleeding has a beautiful sense of fantasy woven throughout the very real pain that exists for Lou and Jackie. The scenes of them driving through the desert at night feels cosmic and otherworldly, the stars in that big, empty sky are reminiscent of the world that exists beyond this small town. It’s a world Jackie and Lou can have if they let themselves. The film’s climax leans fully into the fantastical elements, and elicited raucous laughter from theatergoers at my screening, but that reaction felt like the simplest answer to process this turn of events. Without spoiling it, the moment (you’ll know it when you see it) speaks directly to the Bury Your Gays trope. It’s a magical interpretation of the superhuman feelings that come with feeling free to be one’s self without fear.
There are going to be polarized reactions to Love Lies Bleeding because it doesn’t present itself as a fully good or bad revenge tale. It’s not a morality tale, nor was it ever seeking to be considered one. Love Lies Bleeding is the spiritual sister to the Wachowski Sisters’ quintessential queer revenge flick Bound. There’s electricity in both Bound and Love Lies Bleeding that always comes back to the treatment of its queer characters. It’s still so rare to see these characters presented in an honest way, and perhaps that is Love Lies Bleeding’s greatest strength. It’s a queer film made for a queer audience that harkens back to the days of lesbian pulp fiction with a neo-noir, neon edge, complete with an ’80s synth soundtrack. Love Lies Bleeding is an amalgamation of the genres and stories that came before it, but wholeheartedly breaks the expectations of those films. From the rubble comes something entirely new – a movie where the gays do the burying.
Follow me on BlueSky, Instagram, Letterboxd, & YouTube. Check out Movies with My Dad, a new podcast recorded on the car ride home from the movies.