2024 Sundance Film Festival Movie Review: Love Lies Bleeding

Director and co-writer Rose Glass firmly establishes herself as one of the most exciting up-and-coming directors with her latest film Love Lies Bleeding, a pulpy, bloody queer romance about our past and familial sins that features the best performance of Kristen Stewart’s career.

Stewart plays Lou, a reclusive manager of a grimy gym in 1980s New Mexico. One day at the gym, she meets Jackie (Katy O’Brian), who is rolling through town to get to Las Vegas for a bodybuilding competition. They fall hard for each other and Jackie crashes with Lou for a bit while also unknowingly getting a job working for Lou’s criminal father Lou Sr. (Ed Harris) at his gun range. When Lou’s sister (Jena Malone) is beaten to within an inch of her life by her perpetually angry and scummy husband JJ (Dave Franco), it sets off a string of violence and coverups and resurfaces Lou’s past sins and history with her father.

Love Lies Bleeding is a gritty, slick crime film that plays a little bit like a queer version of Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive. The filmmaking is stylized and beautifully done and the moments of extreme violence (that had the woman sitting next to me in my screening audibly gasping and cursing out loud) are bloody and gross but artistically shot. This is all mixed with a complicated love story, a compelling protagonist at the center of the film, and an iconic actor at their most villainous.

What kept me captivated throughout Love Lies Bleeding‘s crime plot was the love story between Lou and Jackie. This is a complicated love story, as Lou has no problem living her life as a recluse and not getting into any trouble, while Jackie has dreams and ambitions of a bodybuilding career. All of this is thrown out the window as the blood and lies begin to pile up and their relationship is put to the test. Stewart and O’Brian have excellent chemistry and their relationship gives this brutal, violent movie a good amount of heart that has you rooting for them.

Stewart is tremendous as Lou and gives what I think is the best performance of her career. Lou is a cleaner of messes. The beginning of the film finds Lou cleaning a disgusting toilet at the gym and for the rest of the movie, she continues to clean up messes. Messes she’s gotten herself into, and messes Jackie has gotten them into, and she starts to expose the messes her father brought upon her while she was growing up. Seeing Stewart go from vulnerable and affectionate to Jackie to a stone-cold machine with a plan on how to hide a body was brilliant and she does it with ease and confidence. O’Brian, a relatively newer actress given her most complex role yet, brings physicality to the performance and does a great job portraying a woman who ends up spiraling down a rabbit hole following a major mistake. Harris is menacing as Lou Sr., a brutal, evil man who will send shivers down your spine with a simple glare. It’s Harris’s best work in years.

Love Lies Bleeding is a sexy, dirty, violent noir with a love story at its core. It is anchored by Stewart’s career-best performance, an excellent supporting cast, and some slick filmmaking from Glass.

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