Director: Rose Glass
Writer: Rose Glass, Weronika Tofilska
Cast: Kristen Stewart, Anna Baryshnikov, Dave Franco, Ed Harris
Duration: 104 mins
Love is clumsy. How clumsy? Suppose you vomit your lover, them landing in a pile of translucent slime in front of you. That is love. To gun your lover’s side girl, their projectile blood splatting on your lover’s face. That, too, is love. Removing the yolk from eggs being cooked, by hand, per their preference. That, obviously, is love. A theory of love that emerges from the banal, to the brutal, the bizarre, Rose Glass’s Love Lies Bleeding, following up on her acclaimed work of body-horror, Saint Maud (2019), works as both a portrait and a provocation.
Lou (Kristen Stewart) runs a gym in a middle-of-America rusting city with a star-spangled sky. Why America? Because as Glass, whose last film bled in a British seaside town, notes in interviews, this is a country where there are signs outside film festival theaters demanding no firearms. Lou plunges the protein powdered shit that clogs the toilets, among other things. She is cool. Enter, Jackie (Katy O’Brian), who spends her first night in the city sleeping above a highway, doing pull ups. She is training for a bodybuilding competition in Las Vegas. She has sex with Lou’s abusive brother-in-law, and through that, cracks a job at Lou’s father’s shooting range. She crosses paths with Lou at her gym — this is, you realize, an incestuously small town — and it is instant attraction, but more movingly, instant affection. The plot thickens when love begins to be seen as something that needs to keep being proven, keep producing evidence of its stain. On the heart. On other bodies. This turns to madness, foul mouthed tensions, body resizing, and ultimately, a union that isn’t bittersweet as much as sour and spicy.