Jackie (Katy M. O’Brian) pumps some iron in “Love Lies Bleeding” (Courtesy of A24)

Little wet gelatinous orbs of yellow egg yolks, slopping over one another on the top of a trash heap, have never looked so erotic as in a memorable montage in Rose Glass’s Love Lies Bleeding, dutifully separated from their whites for a healthier breakfast by Kristen Stewart’s reserved, choppy mulleted gym manager Lou for her new bodybuilder girlfriend Jackie (played phenomenally by Katy M. O’Brian). Neither have steroid injections for that matter, trading Titane’s lonesome aging daddy pricking his own bruised behind for some romantic needle-based penetration. This montage gains some added sex appeal from the song choice alone: Gina X Performance’s electro-transformation anthem “Nice Mover.” Its ascendant robotic opening was enough to make me stifle a scream in the theater. Toss in some hot and heavy glances and tussles in rumpled sheets and it’s hard not to see why one Detroit moviegoer had to be booted out by police after falling asleep with his dick in his hands. Or why Kristen Stewart described the film as “an enormous lady boner.”

She’s not wrong. It’s hard to come up with a film that depicts women desiring women with so much unrestrained eroticism, not just another pent-up lesbian period drama or some girl-on-girl action for the male audience (the theater wanker notwithstanding). Notably, Glass treats a woman bodybuilder’s musclebound form, often dismissed as mannish, exaggerated, and ridiculous, with as much lust as Emerald Fennell drools over Jacob Elordi’s golden bod in Saltburn. I can’t think of a woman bodybuilder given as much serious attention since Robert Mapplethorpe’s gorgeous photographs of Lisa Lyon. Said simply, Love Lies Bleeding is a hot film. The love here is burning, just like the Elvis reference on a T-shirt worn by Jackie through much of the film. But it’s not just lust in the dust of New Mexico. Bodies, cars, and evidence are burning too.

Despite being an English filmmaker, Glass constructs a world within Love Lies Bleeding that is thoroughly American—astonishingly violent, abjectly disgusting, and absurdly camp in equal measure. The first we see of Lou is crouched over a piss-and-shit-stained toilet, digging turds out of its clogged depths with her own gloved hands, throwing the poopy remnants into a bucket with a thick thwack. This isn’t the only gag-including moment. The entire film seems coated in a permanent layer of flop sweat, grime, grease, nicotine stains, unwashed hair, and unbrushed butter teeth. So much so that you can smell it. While the film’s baseline is a lingering slime, Glass also revels in instances of projectile fluids, whether puke or bottles of blood, and long lingering shots of growing golfball-sized welts on battered faces or teeth embedded in the ground beef-like flesh of a broken skull, the latter of which caused my theater to erupt into screams and groans. Quite clearly, danger lurks around every corner, often from family. Even the dippy sweet-toothed Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov), who majorly clings to Lou, is secretly conniving. It’s only suitable, then, that Lou and Jackie find each other within the context of violence, a kind of “She hit him and it felt like a kiss” meet-cute after Jackie pummels a real-life Mr. Clean and his buddy in the gym parking lot.

Jackie (Katy O’Brian) and Lou (Kristen Stewart) in Love Lies Bleeding (Courtesy of A24)

Though perhaps—ok, definitely—a berserk one, Love Lies Bleeding is, at its core, a love story. In fact, Gina X Performance’s “Nice Mover” reflects a deeper significance than just a sultry beat. “I’m your transformer,” hollers vocalist Gina Kikoine like a Germanic cyborg. Notably, this is not the only song that references transformation on the soundtrack, which also includes Nona Hendryx’s “Transformation” and Patrick Cowley’s “Mutant Man.” On one level, these choices are delightfully winking nods to Jackie’s bodybuilding as she gets more and more, well, jacked. The same goes for the score by Clint Mansell that adds a dash of industrial metal-on-metal clanking and other weight-lifting sounds to the ambient electronica that has become the favored score for elevated contemporary horror. Yet, Lou is a transformer too. With Jackie, Lou’s not the same person we see at the opening of the film, alone in her dingy apartment, smoking cigarettes while listening to quitting smoking cassettes (an ongoing gag throughout the film), feeding her cat, microwaving dinner, and masturbating on the sofa while kitty munches on her half-eaten meal.

Lou could use the relief, only staying in town to try to protect her sister Beth (Jena Malone) from her grinning idiot of an abusive husband JJ (Dave Franco) while also attempting to avoid her estranged criminal and bug collector (and furious muncher) father, Lou Sr., played extraordinarily sleazily by Ed Harris. Despite his limp half-bald, half-long hairstyle that is pure redneck, Lou Sr. owns the town, consisting mostly of a gun range/restaurant and Lou’s gym, as evidenced by his jarringly palatial residence. Given his domination, including of the dirty cops, Jackie naturally also runs into Lou’s Big Daddy when she drifts into town from Oklahoma on her way to Vegas for a bodybuilding competition, hooking up with randos on the way for jobs. Though Lou holds the quintessential anxiety-ridden awkward Kristen Stewart charm (which shouldn’t be dismissed), O’Brian’s Jackie is a particularly captivating character—at once childlike with her enthusiasm for her bodybuilding goals and deeply damaged in a manner that remains unresolved and unexplained. She obviously escaped Oklahoma for more than a dream as her periods of blank dissociation that usually lead to sudden bursts of physical violence attest. “Don’t ever fall in love, okay?” she tells an unknown child family member on the phone before being hung up on. She’s not the only one with demons. Lou experiences flashbacks, drenched in blood red, of helping her father with untold killings—the accessory and crime scene cleaner-upper that she also becomes for Jackie after a (cathartic) murder done in a roid-induced rage sets the plot into overdrive in a way that neither Jackie nor Lou seems able to prevent or stop.

Flashback Lou Sr. (Ed Harris) in Love Lies Bleeding (Courtesy of A24)

In this way, though set in 1989, predating much of its own references, Love Lies Bleeding is a throwback to 1990s us-against-the-world romantic thrillers: David Lynch’s Wild at Heart (though there is also a closet moment that is pure Blue Velvet), Tony Scott’s True Romance, and Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise (yes, I consider that a romance). These are all movies in which a couple stands as a doomed—or at least, threatened—twosome amidst a shitstorm, usually of their own making with a mistaken, chaotic crime of passion at its heart. This genre seems to have been abandoned somewhere along the line in the intervening decades. While some recent films come close, they differ in distinctive ways. Bones and All, for instance, is certainly a romantic road movie, but young cannibals coasting the US highway system strangely don’t have the same kind of low-life criminal element. Similarly, William Oldroyd’s adaptation of Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel Eileen, like Love Lies Bleeding, concerns an obsessive relationship between women yet Eileen (Thomasin McKenzie) is such an alienated character that her fixation with Anne Hathaway’s Rebecca is mainly one-sided—or at the very least ambiguous. When she eventually drives off into a new life post-hostage scenario, she does so alone.

In contrast, Love Lies Bleeding shares much more with these 1990s films, from constant disaster-prone attempts to hide evidence to grody antagonists that are awful to the level of absurdity such as Gary Oldman’s scarred, cataract-eyed pimp Drexl Spivey in True Romance and Willem Dafoe’s tiny-teethed Bobby Peru in Wild at Heart, a trend that Ed Harris’s scraggly haired Lou Sr. doesn’t exactly buck. I also don’t think it’s a mistake that Kristen Stewart’s character is named Lou, only a slight deviation from Laura Dern’s Lula in Wild at Heart. And I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that Elvis seems to haunt many of these films. This isn’t to say Love Lies Bleeding is some progressive take on this genre that simply replaces heterosexual couples with a lesbian one. The film is an important addition to this canon, not some queer copy of it.

Jackie’s (Katy O’Brian) big moment in Vegas in Love Lies Bleeding (Courtesy of A24)

Glass’s choice to take on the romantic thriller genre seems like an enormous departure from her debut: the punishing and austere Saint Maud. Descending into fervent religious mania, Saint Maud centers Maud’s (Morfydd Clark) painful isolation as opposed to the coupling at the heart of Love Lies Bleeding. Yet, there is a subtle camp element to Maud’s self-imagined sainthood that also appears in Love Lies Bleeding. I mean, if walking around town with a bed of nails embedded in Converse isn’t Catholic camp, I don’t know what is. Granted, I know that form of camp is for a select audience. Love Lies Bleeding, however, brings the camp to the fore in a way that is more accessible though also brutal. Even the film’s poster—maybe the only great poster of the 2020s—is pure unbridled Verhoeven bliss with Jackie’s greased-up body in a bikini holding a gun. This is further reflected in the film itself when Jackie ignores Lou’s warnings and hitchhikes straight into a bodybuilding version of Showgirls in Vegas for her competition. Not everything is so broad either. There is something delightfully kitsch about the constant presence of tacky motivational signs around Lou’s gym emblazoned with “Pain is weakness leaving the body” or “The body achieves what the mind believes.” And sure, the film’s over-the-topness becomes a bit much even for me in parts like the perpetual vein-popping, skin-cracking sound effects indicating Jackie’s growing body or the Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman climax. But it’s hard to argue that the latter is any less of a bizarre deus ex machina than the appearance of Glinda the Good Witch in Wild at Heart.  

But more than the camp or the bloodshed, what truly makes these romantic thrillers is that the audience roots for the couple, despite all else, no matter what they have to do, who they have to kill, or what authorities they have to evade. We want Thelma and Louise to escape even if it means pitching themselves off a cliff. We want Alabama and Clarence Worley to run off with their suitcase full of coke. And we want Lula and Sailor to keep dancing on the side of the road. So too with Love Lies Bleeding, a film named after a flower that the Victorians believed stood for hopeless love (Thanks, Google). And Lou and Jackie’s love is both hopeless and hopeful, in which a proclamation of “I love you, idiot” and a sleepy final murder on the road feel a whole lot like devotion.