Review | Love Lies Bleeding | 2024
As someone who was fairly mixed on Rose Glass' otherwise widely acclaimed 2019 debut feature, Saint Maud , I am now fully a Glass convert thanks to her sophomore film, Love Lies Bleeding . In fact, Love Lies Bleeding is perhaps the horniest, most aesthetically electrifying film I've seen in a multiplex in very long time. It's a sweaty, sweltering, heady mix of queer eroticism, crime thriller, magical realism, and dark comedy that feels genuinely rebellious in a way films rarely do anymore. Glass lures us in with a love story between a new-in-town gym rat named Jackie (Katy O’Brian) and a sullen gym clerk named Lou (Kristen Stewart) who spends her days cleaning toilets, vaping, and taking care of her sister (Jena Malone). When Jackie accepts a job working for Lou's sleazy dad (Ed Harris), it sets off a violent chain of events that could either tear them apart or unite them in a shared exorcism of generational trauma. This is essentially Thelma and Louise for a new