Love Lies Bleeding Review: Muscles, Sex & Drugs

It's 1989, New Mexico: the tube socks are pulled high, shaggy hair sways in the desert heat, and muscles gurgle with steroids and desire. Love Lies Bleeding is a knee-jerker that shifts between scenes of the viscerally disturbing to, well, the viscerally steamy.

Rose Glass has returned - and with a  vengeance -  following her debut film Saint Maud, delivering a sweaty and sapphic thriller that echoes the adrenaline of A24's iconic films like Uncut Gems and Good Time. 

Lou (Kristen Stewart), a disgruntled gym manager, spends her days unclogging toilets and slinging steroids to meat heads pumping iron. She listens to motivational tapes about the dangers of smoking while she inhales a whole pack and heats up a TV dinner. Her day-to-day appears dismal, though monotony is short-lived. A buff and beautiful drifter, Jackie (Katy M. O'Brian), makes a pitstop in Lou's podunk town on her way to a bodybuilding competition in Las Vegas. Once entangled in the strands of Lou's greasy mullet and ongoing family crises, Jackie decides to take matters in her own powerful, veiny hands.

This is not your average "smalltown girl swept off her feet" joint. Lou comes with more baggage than a seasoned traveler. Her father, Lou Sr. (Ed Harris with an unsettling skullet), is not only one hell of an antrepenuer, (he owns the gym and a shooting range) but a local crime lord who smuggles weapons and has a habit of making people disappear in New Mexico's deep canyons.

Lou, immediatley enamored with Jackie, takes to the task of separating the yolks from her morning egg whites and injecting her 'roids like a ceremonious gesture of love.

et against an incredible soundtrack, Love Lies Bleeding lifts up unsung heros of electro pop and the avant-garde. Notable songs include Nice Mover by Gina X Performance, The Moon is Blue by Colourbox, and credit-rolling track Surrender by Suicide.

Love Lies Bleeding saves no room for the played-out WLW arcs on screen; there's no straight woman cheating on her husband with a younger woman, 

 It's refreshing to see a relationship that takes the form of its own. 

It is so easy to envision this as the real life of Kristen Stewart. Her mannerisms and style in Love Lies Bleeding 

- Set design (Set in late 80s)

- Compared to other popular lesbian films that portray relationships i.e. blue is the warmest color (the finger scene???)

-”Don’t ever fall in love”

- Love ya sis!

When the IMDB plot keywords say "insane woman," "mad woman," "evil woman," "female female kiss" and "misandry" you know it's going to be a good time.