Why Kristen Stewart’s Love Lies Bleeding is the most gleefully outrageous film of the year

BBC culture/ By Charlotte O’Sullivan,Features correspondent

Full of blood, gore, and steroid-pumped bodybuilding, Rose Glass’s thriller starring Kristen Stewart follows Saltburn as the latest in a wave of wittily shocking films by female directors.

In Love Lies Bleeding, the much-talked-about, brazenly disgusting and filthy new revenge thriller from indie darling distributor A24, gym manager, Lou (Kristen Stewart), tells ambitious bodybuilder, Jackie, (Katy O’Brian): “I want to stretch you”. It’s a remark that should be read (amongst other things) as a statement of intent from the movie’s British director. Rose Glass is on a mission to expand horizons. Luckily for us, going to extremes is what she does best.

Love Lies Bleeding is the follow-up to Glass’s spectacularly bleak and soul-bruising 2022 horror film Saint Maud, and it sees the 34-year-old once again honing in on blood and gore. As well as, this time, excrement, cat-food, needles, guns, writhing bugs and vomit. Set in New Mexico, at the end of the 80s, it pivots on the bad behaviour of Lou’s father and brother-in-law (Ed Harris and Dave Franco). Yet, tellingly, the film hardly positions patriarchy-bashing lovers, Lou and Jackie, as “goodies” and, even as the credits roll, the script (which Glass co-wrote with her pal, Weronika Tofilska) throws curveballs.

A24
Love Lies Bleeding tells a pumped-up story of lovers seeking revenge – one a gym manager, the other a bodybuilder (Credit: A24)

Glass’s movie can be dazzling. During one surreal sequence, a steroid-pumped Jackie literally rises to the occasion during a battle between Lou and her dad. No spoilers, here, but the CGI work is eye-smackingly beautiful. It’s also funny as hell – a typical visual gag sees Lou reading a book called Macho Sluts. The most gloriously perverse film of the year, Love Lies Bleeding is at heart a naughty alt-epic about what it means to “get nasty”.

While all the actors ooze charisma, gorgeous, talented O’Brian is the star of the show. It’s not often you see a female romantic lead whose body takes up so much room. Though she is as soft-faced as Maria Schneider, her limbs resemble giant knotted loaves and, in silhouette, she’s hulking. A former martial arts star, O’Brian trained for roughly 10 weeks to create that look. In other words, the muscles are real.

By putting queer women at the centre of the story and viewing them through a female gaze, Glass is immediately shaking up the body horror genre – Anna Smith

The use of O’Brian’s brawn – in tandem with nerve-jangling sound effects, inventive VFX and the aforementioned gore – will raise the pulse of anyone interested in “body horror”. Where this sub-genre is concerned, David Cronenberg is generally viewed as king, yet Glass, without giving too much away, has found a way to build on the visceral transformations showcased with such verve by the Canadian auteur in movies like Shivers, The Brood and The Fly. Whether accidentally or by design, Glass makes Cronenberg’s most recent offering – 2022’s Crimes of the Future, a morose neo-noir, featuring Stewart in a small role – look tragically old hat.

Critic Anna Smith views Glass as a galvanising new force in horror cinema. “By putting queer women at the centre of the story and viewing them through a female gaze, Glass is immediately shaking up the body horror genre.” For programmer Grace Barber-Plentie, who selected Love Lies Bleeding for this year’s BFI Flare Film Festival, what makes Glass’s brand of body horror special is the “sense of humour and tongue-in-cheekness. The whole world is off-kilter and uncanny”.

Playful extremities

Nor is Glass a lone voice. Along with another UK director, Emerald Fennell – whose wildly wicked and often deliberately tasteless 2023 comedy Saltburn, revolves around sexually ambiguous, homicidal anti-hero, Oliver Quick – Glass is part of a wave of witty women who are a pleasure to watch because they’re in no mood to please.

Alamy
Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn similarly stirred conversation for its wild provocations (Credit: Alamy)

Barber-Plentie sees an overlap between Love Lies Bleeding and the work of French director, Julia Ducournau, especially the latter’s playfully deranged, 2021 Palme d’Or winner Titane, about a girl with a titanium plate in her head who grows up to be a serial killer, and is impregnated by a car before passing herself off as a man’s long-lost son. “[In both] the body horror and provocative scenes sit in amongst fully fleshed out narratives. And both films subvert the idea of a ‘strong female character’, showing that physical and mental strength are two very different things.”

However Barber-Plentie also points out that there’s nothing new about transgressive female filmmakers. “For a very long time,” she says, “female directors have been ‘shameless’, in terms of the provocative images they’ve shown in their films.” She references Claire Denis’ Trouble Every Day, made in 2001 and slated by critics upon its release. The movie, part of a movement dubbed New French Extremity, closes with a sexual cannibal, who’s just devoured a hotel maid, embracing his lonely young wife, who may or not have spotted the drops of blood on their shower curtain. “That last shot,” says Barber-Plentie, “is one of the most distressing and vivid images I’ve ever seen.”

Films made by female directors that contain shocking scenes are now part of the mainstream – Grace Barber-Plentie

What’s changed since the 2000s, according to Smith, is that audiences are now clamouring for such content, and “midnight movies”, as they used to be known, are all the rage, becoming commercial, not just cult, hits. “Money talks,” declares Smith. “The fact that critics and audiences supported Saint Maud and Promising Young Woman [Emerald Fennell’s violent feature debut] – albeit, in many cases, at home, during the pandemic – helped their producers to get financing and distribution for their next projects.”

Carole Bethuel
Love Lies Bleeding has similarities with Julia Ducournau’s bizarre 2021 Palme d’Or winner Titane (Credit: Carole Bethuel)

Barber-Plentie agrees that so-called “outrageous” female directors currently have access to a bigger audience, and feels Fennell’s career, in particular, highlights this shift. “A film like Saltburn gained notoriety and went ‘viral’ really quickly. It was the talk of TikTok and was even featured on Gogglebox. Films made by female directors that contain shocking scenes are now part of the mainstream.”

To judge by the buzz surrounding Love Lies Bleeding, Glass’s fabulously flawed couple, Lou and Jackie, could soon be as omnipresent as Saltburn’s bathwater-drinking Oliver Quick. These days, stories spun by women don’t have to be nice (or niche). All hail a cultural revolution, that’s positively dripping with blood.

Love Lies Bleeding is out in US cinemas now and is released in UK cinemas on 3 May.

Anna Smith is host of the Girls On Film podcast. You can hear Rose Glass in the latest episode of Girls On Film.

The 38th BFI Flare: London LGBTQIA+ Film Festival takes place 13-24 March at BFI Southbank and on BFI Player; Love Lies Bleeding screens at BFI Flare on 18 March.

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Hollywood/ Features