LOVE LIES BLEEDING: Amor Fati in Neon Gothic

Love, lust and loyalty are as integral as thrills to director Rose Glass' explosive new film.

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Mar 14, 2024

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Love Lies Bleeding, the romantic thriller from writer-director Rose Glass, opens with a sequence evoking the nocturnal stylings of Michael Mann, blended with the monolithic cosmic spirituality of Panos Cosmatos’ Mandy (2018). We’re rapidly immersed in a world where love and death dance together in a hauntingly cognate choreography. The film centres on Lou and Jackie, two female characters who Glass ensures cut unique, albeit somewhat unfilled cinematic figures. From what we learn, Lou (Kristen Stewart) is entangled in a dangerous web of familial abuse, from her sinister father, the local crime boss Lou Sr. (Ed Harris), to her sister Beth (Jenna Malone) being a battered wife to her abusive husband, JJ (Dave Franco). Blood red psychic memory-visions gradually reveal that Lou once served as her father’s underworld understudy—a hands-on criminal operator who knows both killing and cover up. Jackie is introduced as a homeless “big girl” wandering New Mexico in search of a job, a place to stay and a gym to train at. While Jackie is ostensibly preparing for a bodybuilding competition in Las Vegas, she’s also running from her own family. Her religious Oklahoman parents demean her bisexuality, estranging Jackie from a sibling she would otherwise be close to. Both characters possess barely repressed anger from their thorny familial relationships. When Jackie first waltzes into the gym Lou manages for her father, Lou’s acutely lascivious gaze trains on her as she pumps various muscles. It only takes moments for their first conversation to reveal a ferocious mutual desire, and a recklessness that portends later events.

Stewart and O'Brian deliver tour de force performances, embodying the film's themes with a raw intensity that is as unsettling as it is captivating. Despite the ferocity of their love and the increasingly complex criminal drama it causes, the characters remain distinctly vivid without being cartoonish. This is the sharpest aspect of Glass’ work with co-writer Weronika Tofilska: while the stakes rise catastrophically, their characters remain true to themselves, making believably ill-advised and rash choices. Yet the repeated escalations allow Lou to demonstrate her preternatural ability to carve a path back to Jackie. Stewart shines in her portrayal of a woman consumed by love as a form of escape from a demented family, while O'Brian's performance is equally compelling as a comparably immature woman driven to extremes by the dominance of her desires. Audiences will be struck by the fidelity of the fear Stewart conjures, alongside anxious improvisation and fierce eroticism in her combustible romance with Jackie. Likewise, in O’Brian’s commitment to Jackie’s physical transformation, Glass finds the bodybuilding beau idéal—a woman whose towering physique inspires simultaneous awe and terror. Lou’s is a love of protective service, while Jackie is driven by the will to impress, hoping to mitigate a buried sense of inadequacy. Together, the palpable chemistry of the film’s leads gives potent force to the cliché of explosive queer lust and love.

In dressing her neon gothic crime odyssey in noir trappings, Glass imbues Lou and Jackie’s same-sex attraction with provocations toward the genre’s history. A distinctive trope of traditional film noir is the femme fatale—a seductive, mysterious woman who lures the male protagonist into danger. Love Lies Bleeding reconfigures and complicates this crux by rendering Lou, the film’s equivalent to a typical noir hero—a solitary, disillusioned man—a woman. Far from straightforwardly falling victim to her femme fatale, Lou is certainly culpable in the development of Jackie’s steroid addiction. Glass does not cheaply do away with masculinity however. Both characters have male names with Lou’s deriving from her father, framing her Oedipal struggle against him. Lou is recalcitrant to ‘open up’ to Jackie, who develops into a fascinating inversion of an archetypal contemporary male: dependent, narcissistic and abusive. Both women experience severe bouts of jealousy, which they handle with characteristic male petulance. Unlike conventional noirs, Glass irreverently denies the audience a damsel in distress, instead pitting Lou and Jackie directly against each other at times, while also forcing them to rely on each other. In this way, the film embodies its characters’ struggle with their own vulnerabilities and the masculinity of the other—a quest to actualise Simone de Beauvoir’s notion of authentic love, which must be reciprocal and non-exploitative.

Glass never slips into celebrating Lou and Jackie’s love as a categorical good. What Love Lies Bleeding lacks in the way of character ontogeny (or, the developmental history of an organism within its lifetime), it compensates with scintillatingly rendered sexuality—not merely its productive nature, but also its destructive potential. On their first night together, Lou gets Jackie hooked on steroids to boost her prospects of triumph, setting into motion the turbulent events of the film’s plot. If Beauvoir’s suggestion that “the body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project” is correct, then Jackie’s swelling, muscular body is the film’s tableaux. By the time Lou and Jackie find themselves tending to Lou’s sister (Beth) in hospital after a particularly grotesque beating at the hands of her husband (JJ), Jackie’s body is pulsating with juice, unable to contain the rage within. In a morbid transference of her burning love of Lou, Jackie acts where the police refuse to, crushing JJ’s skull against his coffee table, cleaving his face. Jackie’s visual dominion over the mangled corpse evokes Georges Bataille’s notion of the intimate connection between death and eroticism, both representing ultimate transgressions against the limits of oneself and those imposed by society. By murdering JJ out of devotion to Lou, Jackie creates a transcendent continuity that dissolves the boundaries between the two lovers. After recoiling in understandable disgust at the gruesome sight of JJ’s now split face, Lou moves swiftly into enginous corpse-disposal mode, echoing her past. As such, Jackie’s vigilante justice is transformed into a moment of sublime unity, creating the space for a potentially liberated future together.

The rest of the film takes place in this state of profound instability, as Lou and Jackie move in and out of each other's lives while desperately attempting to elude both the wrath of Lou’s father (Lou Sr.) and law enforcement. Herein lies the playful genre-trappings employed by Glass, who never allows us to feel confident that the pair will emerge together, much less with their liberty intact. Glass zeroes in on a particular motivational slogan—“Destiny is a decision”—like many plastered across the walls of the gym where our lovers meet. With this and similar literalisations, Glass reveals her film’s Nietzschean aspect: the notorious philosopher’s concept of “Amor Fati”, latin for “love of fate”. Despite her discomfort with her past, Lou’s expert criminality is integral to crafting the couple’s potential escape. One of the film’s most arresting visuals is the abyssal canyon out in the desert, used by the Lous as a dumping ground for dead bodies. Like Bataille, Glass suggests that by “leaning out over deranged horror [...] The abyss is the foundation of the possible”. In using this same abyss to bring to light her father’s criminality, Lou embraces her fate past and present, manifesting her strength of character against Jackie’s corporeal power. What Love Lies Bleeding implies is that while herculean, Jackie’s violent roid rage and rodomontade are forms of dissimulation. Her rescue by Lou demonstrates that true might is found within.