Cinema: “Love Lies Bleeding”: Queer to the core

In the Wikipedia entry for the film “Love Lies Beeding” there is a very good genre definition: “a neo-noir romantic thriller dark comedy film”. If you add director Rose Glass’s initial idea and the preparation on set, you get a pretty good idea of ​​what to expect: Glass says in an interview with the magazine “Little White Lies” that she was making a “sweaty film.” want to play in the US bodybuilding scene. And in preparation she showed her team “Crash” by David Cronenberg and Paul Verhoeven’s “Showgirls”. So we have a pretty eclectic mix of genres that screws together black humor, a rather dark world view, sweaty bodies and body horror and lets everything be played or rather acted out by a cast that is constantly emotionally on the edge.

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The whole thing again in the form of a plot summary: Jackie (Katy O’Brian) stops in the desert of New Mexico on the way to a bodybuilding competition in Las Vegas. At the local bodybuilding center she meets Lou (Kristen Stewart), who laminates the membership cards and gets the clogged toilets working again. The two quickly end up in bed together, move in together and set the screen on fire in the sex scenes, but also otherwise, in a breakfast scene. “Love Lies Bleeding” is not only a romantic neo-noir with thriller and darkly humorous comedy elements, but also queer to the core. Last but not least, a film that can also plunge male, heterosexual viewers into sadness that they can no longer become lesbians in this life.

Jackie starts injecting muscle building drugs. Lou’s brother-in-law (Dave Franco), a mullet sleazebag rarely found in 80s retro cinema, repeatedly beats up Lou’s sister (Jena Malone). When he beats her to the hospital, the escalation that was practiced on screen bodies in “Love Lies Bleeding” begins. Jackie’s affect control goes overboard and she smashes her friend’s brother-in-law’s head on the living room floor, to the delight of all viewers who know what domestic violence means. So the brother-in-law is broken, Jackie and Katy dump it into a ravine in the desert and burn it. As a result, there are problems with the FBI, the corrupt local police and, above all, with Lou’s gangster father (Ed Harris), who doesn’t think the murder of his son-in-law was so successful.

The images from “Love Lies Bleeding” are overheated and radiate a perfectly staged, sustained intensity. The tonality of the violent sequences, which are very drastic at times, is reminiscent of the excesses in David Lynch’s “Wild at Heart.” Rose Glass borrows at least two what-the-fuck moments from David Cronenberg’s Body Horror. The first is still characterized as a muscle building preparation-induced hallucination. With the second, “Love Lies Bleeding” jumps into the fantastic and then literally takes giant steps towards its grim happy ending. But even in the moments in which the film relishes pushing itself out of the curve, it never seems self-serving or in love with its own crassness. The genre references and register changes are far too confident for that.

Kristen Stewart announced in an interview with “Rolling Stone” that was illustrated with offensive portrait photos that she wanted to do “the gayest fucking thing you’ve ever seen in your life” soon, and whether the project was in her eyes with “Love Lies Bleeding.” is completed remains unclear. But the film would definitely be a giant step in this direction. Last but not least, “Love Lies Bleeding” is a blatant homage to the destructive potential of queerness. What is destroyed here is always marked beforehand as worthy of destruction.
In his constant state of emergency, Jackie recommends that he shouldn’t fall in love with her stepbrother; it would be too painful. In the end, “Love Lies Bleeding” votes for love, despite all the pain. For whom, however, some things first have to be removed with a gun or a courageous kick: patriarchal fathers, manipulative rivals, toxic family men who beat up their wives. In the end, “Love Lies Bleeding” is, above all, an incredibly romantic film. And an incredibly sweaty one too.

»Love Lies Bleeding«: USA/UK 2024. Director: Rose Glass. Book: Rose Glass, Weronika Tofilska. Starring: Kristen Stewart, Katy O’Brian, Jena Malone, Ed Harris, Anna Baryshnikov, Dave Franco. 104 min. Now in cinemas.