Love Lies Bleeding features Stewart as a loser falling for a bodybuilder in a gonzo, lesbian, neo-noir, erotic thriller – dig in
As an actor, the reliably marvellous Kristen Stewart is adroit at having things happen to, at, or otherwise around her. This is not quite the same as being a cinematic straight man: aside from the very obvious reason that describing Kristen Stewart of all people as a ‘straight’ anything is absurd, she is too much of a charismatic presence in her own right, and her affect, alternately squirrely and deadpan, draws its own kind of attention from the camera. She is a new brand of star, in the sense that the qualities both directors and fans admire in her are those more typically admired in male actors: she can play nerdy but she is, there is no doubt, kind of a stud. Like one telegenic Zen master of the screen in particular, she careens between one shock and the next – vampirism, say, or eroticised surgery, or terrorism – with a look that suggests she is perpetually on the verge of breathing whoah, dude at the spectacle. Forget gender-flipping Ghostbusters – we as a society ought to press Martin Scorsese into remaking his jittery 1985 comedy After Hours with the same script, and with Stewart in the role formerly occupied by Griffin Dunne. Think about it: Stewart, bored to the bones with her job, meets a strange babe on a dark and lonely night, and is driven wild enough with lust that it sets her off on an ever-escalating, catastrophic odyssey, full of danger and intrigue. You can imagine the neurotic slapstick comedy, the sweat – the way her desire to get laid and her ever-increasing horror at her situation would do battle on that face, with its shadowy eyes and its cowboy jawline, and the way that her frustration would be all the funnier for its being repressed.
Then again, Love Lies Bleeding – the sophomore feature of the British director Rose Glass – has just been released, and perhaps that’s close enough. As Lou, a shy gym-worker who is estranged from her crime boss father, Lou Sr. (Ed Harris), Stewart begins the film as something of a loser, going home to feed her cat and masturbate after a shift. Enter Katy O’Brian’s Jackie, a bodybuilding drifter in a pair of striped shorts that are more of a suggestion than a garment, with such swaggering aplomb that I genuinely can’t remember whether she is in slow-motion or it simply feels like she is. Of all the gyms in all the world, she had to walk into Lou’s, and the walk in question is a gloriously horny bit of business. We do not often see bodies like O’Brian’s in the movies, and Glass lingers on her musculature, the gleam and heft of it, as lovingly as Steven Soderbergh shot Channing Tatum’s abs in Magic Mike (2012). Soon, the two are flirting, with Lou administering a steroid shot to Jackie’s ass as a form of foreplay. Jackie – partly because she is unhoused, and partly because the film is winking at the U-Haul of it all – moves into Lou’s apartment overnight. She has also secured a waitressing job at Lou Sr.’s dingy gun club, and the introduction of all that explosive phallic weaponry into their lesbian idyll feels immediately like a terrible omen. As soon as it’s revealed that Lou’s sister is being routinely beaten by her grotesque, horribly-moustachioed husband (Dave Franco), we know something is about to go awry. If Kristen Stewart, with a dirtbag mullet and a cigarette dangling from her lips, wanted a man dead, would you kill him for her? If your answer is ‘immediately, with my bare hands’, then this movie is for you.
Glass’s first film, Saint Maud (2019), was a sober horror story about loneliness and martyrdom – maybe-metaphorical, maybe-spiritual, definitely rather serious. Here, she strikes a different tone. What’s Love Lies Bleeding like? It’s as if True Romance (1993) and The Greasy Strangler (2016) had a baby, and the baby was extremely gay, or as if the characters from a Harmony Korine film had somehow crossed over into a picture by the Coen brothers; it replicates the classic screwball comedy dynamic whereby a shy, nebbish guy has his life upended by a mad, wild, sexy woman, except in this instance the shy nebbish guy is Stewart, and the mad, wild, sexy woman is O’Brian, an actress and professional bodybuilder who could probably bench press Katharine Hepburn and Barbara Stanwyck at the same time. It is a strange, gonzo picture, a lesbian romance and a neo-noir, and an erotic thriller and a gross-out gallows comedy about murder, and although it sometimes descends into abstract or surrealist imagery, there’s no clear analogy in play. If, like me, you have grown weary of hearing The Walker Brothers’ admittedly excellent ‘The Electrician’ (1978) used as a harbinger of dread, fear not – instead Love Lies Bleeding deploys, somewhat unbelievably, Throbbing Gristle’s ‘Hamburger Lady’ (also 1978) to terrific, nauseating effect. In one scene, a coffee table and a man’s head have a memorable interaction, and although I would not like to say which one comes out on top, I will say that if you’ve seen David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997), you might recognise that Glass is mounting an homage.
Co-written with Weronika Tofilska, Glass’s film is populated by working-class characters with stained teeth and puke stains on their sleeveless t-shirts, lending it – along with its 1980s period setting – a potentially questionable air of ‘white trash’ voyeurism. It is, I think, meant to be a little tasteless, and its tastelessness is a part of its charm: it feels like a film that might have been released ten years ago rather than now, an observation that I mean as a compliment rather than a criticism. In effect, it is offering what the culture thought it wanted when it tried reviving the ‘sleaze’ part of ‘indie sleaze’, and it sticks the landing. Stewart and O’Brian both look molten-hot, and their chemistry is molten, too, even if the actual romance is (deliberately) somewhat thin. Cleverly, the film equates the rush of love-or-lust at first sight with the effects of steroids, depicting both things as a sudden high that can make us feel like superheroes, but can also damage our ability to think or to see – again, with no pun intended – straight. Mostly, Love Lies Bleeding is notable for being exactly the kind of movie Kristen Stewart should be making: weird, ambitious, darkly funny, queer, a world away from 2021’s Diana biopic Spencer. There, I complained that she had been consigned to delivering a faithful, prim impersonation, the film’s pretty formality and camp screenplay conspiring to trap her like a rare bird in a cage. To say that the strength of her performance in Love Lies Bleeding is that she plays something closer to herself (or to the way she appears in the public eye as Kristen Stewart, at least) is not to say that she can only play herself. It is to say that, like any number of well-respected actors, and actors of classic Hollywood especially, she is so compelling and unusual that it pays to simply let her do her thing onscreen – and do it well enough that all her audience can really say, faced with the spectacle, is whoah, dude.
Philippa Snow is a writer based in Norfolk. Her first book, Which as You Know Means Violence, is out now with Repeater.
