Sundance 2024 | Movie Review: Rose Glass' Sophomore Film "Love Lies Bleeding" Packs A Provocative Punch
10/12 ForReel Score | 4.5/5 Stars
Being one of the most anticipated films of the Sundance Film Festival this year - let alone the whole year - Rose Glass’ sophomore feature Love Lies Bleeding pulls no punches, figuratively and literally. Led by a powerhouse duo of Academy Award nominee Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian, Love Lies Bleeding follows the love story of Lou (Stewart), an unsociable gym manager, and Jackie (O’Brian), a bodybuilder who drifts from city to city on her way to a bodybuilding competition in Las Vegas. Set in New Mexico in the late 1980s, Love Lies Bleeding is a remarkable genre film that twists David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence and Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise into an idiosyncratic beast. Although it’s only January, Love Lies Bleeding has the potential to be the best thriller of 2024.
The film opens with a montage of patrons at Lou’s gym pumping iron and getting swole, accompanied by close-ups of muscles flexing, sweat dripping, and metal clanging. An inventive pastiche of 80s genre films, Love Lies Bleeding ramps up fairly quickly. After a meet-cute outside of the gym, Lou and Jackie begin an intense sexual relationship, prompting genuine happiness into Lou’s routine despondency.
Image courtesy of Sundance
However, the rug is pulled even quicker, and the two lovers are forced into a violent downward spiral that left me breathless. As the tension ramped up and the stakes were raised, I found myself petrified in a way that very few thrillers do. The film’s exhilarating nature is an excellent reminder of why I love the thriller genre in the first place, as very few genres provoke such intense emotions out of me as thrillers do. Things go from bad to worse to even worse, which left me muttering “Oh no” and “Oh my God” to myself more times than I can count on my fingers.
A sapphic and ultraviolent counterpart to the Safdie brothers’ Good Time, Love Lies Bleeding is all gas and no brakes, save for the moments of extremely dark comedy. The moments of violence, while sparse, are shocking and earned, with one brutal moment in particular eliciting gasps from the rest of the crowd, while my eyes widened with fervor in anticipation as to what would come next.
As expected, Kristen Stewart is fantastic in her role as Lou, showing a wide array of emotions and some hilarious line deliveries, especially with Ed Harris, who plays her devious father. What I didn’t expect, however, was Katy O’Brien’s standout leading performance. Her intense physicality, as well as her deteriorating psychological state, feels like a mix of Natalie Portman in Black Swan and Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler. The scenes they share are sublime, romantic, and extremely steamy.
When things kick into high gear, their tension builds as you want these two lovers to succeed and escape from the hole they’ve dug for themselves, resulting in a pulse-pounding experience. In the wake of Good Time, Uncut Gems, and now Love Lies Bleeding, A24 seems to be an exemplary studio for thrillers. However, most of the thriller genre centers around straight men, which makes Love Lies Bleeding a welcome spin on such an inherently hypermasculine genre.
Like David Cronenberg, a very evident inspiration for Glass’ films, Glass doesn’t try anything stylistic behind the camera. Instead, she opts for Cronenberg’s style of intense graphic violence, passionate sexuality, and a palpable sense of mood. Glass shoots Lou’s flashback sequences in a stunning shade of crimson, reflecting the anger she feels as well as the violence from her past, brought on by her father, who may or may not be a mob-tied arms dealer. Harris is as imposing and creepy as ever, which is saying something considering his extensive catalog of villainous performances.
After an already high-octane first two acts, the grand slam of the finale works extremely well, as Glass makes some big swings that some viewers might find hamfisted, forced, or out of left field. Although I did feel somewhat underwhelmed by the finale, it still works in the grand scheme of the narrative. Love Lies Bleeding is as white-knuckle as thrillers can get, and is undoubtedly one of the best thrillers of the decade so far.