Review of the movie Love Lies Bleeding

Kristen Stewart and The Mandalorian actress Katie O’Brien, who is also a martial artist, play a couple in love in the crime retro-love thriller Love Lies Bleeding. This is a feminocentric anti-patriarchal art-fighting film where literal bodybuilding is a beautiful and bloody metaphor for the figurative muscle that shatters the male world of tyrants, rapists, home-wreckers, aggressors, oppressors and just plain assholes. According to the author and director Rose Glass, it is impossible for women to overcome such a world unless they become men in character and body.

The action takes place in the late 1980s on the outskirts of provincial America, somewhere in the Mountain West between Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico, in the middle of nowhere, where there is only a cheap pancake and margarita place, a musty gym and a large shooting range. Everything in the town is owned by a local authority (Ed Harris in a nasty and rather frightening monstrous image of a manic insect lover with very long and very thin gray hair), a gangster, an arms dealer, a murderer, the father of Stewart’s quiet heroine named Lou, who works as a gym receptionist but does not communicate with her father on principle. And she would definitely get as far away from this hellhole as possible if it weren’t for her love for her sister, a miserable fool with a bunch of kids who adores the freak of a husband who systematically beats her and will definitely kill her one day. However, then Lou will finally be able to free herself from the ties of family and run away from home.

The girl’s gray and monotonous life, surrounded by sweaty men, clogged toilets and stupid motivational signs about the strength of the spirit and the strength of the body, changes when a stranger comes to the gym wearing an Olympian’s tunic and very short boxers, the goddess Jackie with the body of an ancient sculpture. Their falling in love and crazy sex first leads to the exposure of all the small and big addictions (to cigarettes, to doping, to family ties, to the dark past, to the notorious American dream), and then to the attempts to free themselves from all those nooses and escape.

The young British director Rose Glass paints a harsh realistic and at the same time “cosmic” surreal world, which makes the aesthetics of Love Lies Bleeding reminiscent of Panos Cosmatos’ cult psychedelic horror-action film Mandy, where Nicolas Cage’s character, in the same mood and setting of the masculine, drug-addled punk of the 80s, furiously avenged his beloved on a gang of hellish acid bikers and a sadistic freak of a false messiah of a religious cult. In both cases, the fierce and wild ultra-bloody hyper-reality is combined with the poetic surge of the cosmic starry sky, and space as a hallucinogen, contrasting with the ruthless meat prose, or rather ruthless meat epic, reveals an alternative world of lyrics, mysticism, mythology and tales of minotaurs living in underground labyrinths and ikars flying to the sun.

Throughout the film, the same sound is heard loudly and intrusively several times: the crack of a swelling muscle. This sound is unpleasant, painful, powerful. It is similar to the popping of popcorn and at the same time indicates flesh that cracks and tears from tension. Rose Glass doubts that declarative feminism can overcome male dictatorship. Therefore, she turns the vagina into a muscle instead of a manifesto. We can say that the director resorts to the same superheroism that comics use, in particular the current trend of distinctly feminine comics. She even ironically quotes “The Hulk Woman” and feminizes the cartoon about Popeye the sailor who ate spinach as a dope, and his biceps-triceps (or rather, his brachialis muscles) grew unbelievably before our eyes to punch bad guys like weights.

Kristen Stewart and Katie O’Brien are the new Bonnie and Clyde. They also intertwine the road of love with the road of crime in a sensually bloody braid. They both throb nervously with clenched fists in the unclenched sternum of this emancipatory journey, like sinus tachycardia. They are fragile, traumatized, confused, but not weak, soft, or rarefied. And they are determined to bury the minotaur in a deep crevice to fly together to the sun and stars.