To give you an idea of ​​what to expect with Love Lies Bleeding (2024), imagine a mix between Lynch, Tarantino, and the Coens. Director and screenwriter Rose Glass ventures into that strange galaxy. The film embraces the narrative of neo-noir to take the audience on a frenetic journey with all the ingredients that the title suggests. It engages with the approach and keeps us captive with perfect execution and very weighty performances. Glass is risky and confident in its conception and in the tone of its narrative.

Lou (Kristen Stewart) is the manager of a small-time gym in a New Mexico town. Lou’s routine is fractured when Jackie (Katy O’Brian), a bodybuilder trying to get to a competition in Las Vegas, appears. The script of Love Lies Bleeding is anchored in the relationship that develops between Lou and Jackie, the drama constantly changes into a black comedy as well as an intense thriller. Lou’s family’s sinister past complicates his relationship with Jackie and the love story becomes tinged with revenge.

No Vengeance Without Blood

The photography of Ben Fordesman, the director’s collaborator on her first film Saint Maud (2019), plays a fundamental role in the evolution of the story and its characters. Fordesman’s camera gives us wonderful close-ups but is also perfect in those open shots that have a very well-balanced composition. To accompany the cinematography work, the production design is used thoroughly to transport us to the 80s, in the environment where the story takes place. The use of colors, especially red, is a resource that director Glass uses to take the audience through the different emotional planes that the characters experience.

Love Lies and Bleeding flirts with the dreamlike and gives us some sequences that make us question the reality of the acts experienced by the central characters. With all the intention, the director decides to use those moments to touch on themes that transcend the story itself and that are developed as secondary ideas. Generational family trauma is perhaps the constant in these themes, but so is the repression that the female characters experience at the hands of oppressive male figures.
Rose Glass conceives a solid, visually striking film that borrows from many other filmmakers and styles to find its own path. Love Lies and Bleeding is a furious journey that delivers what it promises.