When you’ve been the face of teenage yearning in a blockbuster romance franchise that notched up US$3.3 billion at the global box office, you know how to convey desire in a single look. Kristen Stewart’s pining stares might’ve filled five Twilight movies, but they’ve got nothing on her gaze in Love Lies Bleeding. Whenever her gym manager Lou peers at Katy O’Brian’s Jackie, the new bodybuilder that’s drifted into her rural New Mexico town, flames might as well leap from her eyes.
In this sweaty neo-noir erotic thriller from English writer/director Rose Glass (Saint Maud), their love burns – searing each other’s hearts with its intensity and reducing everyone who stands in their way to ash (sometimes metaphorically, sometimes literally).
Smouldering, too, doesn’t just describe Lou’s lusty looks Jackie’s way, but how Glass deploys her lead in a delicious piece of pulp and a gleeful wild-ride romance that plays out beneath a twinkling desert sky. Sparkling isn’t just what the celestial bodies above the film’s star-crossed lovers do, either.
Love Lies Bleeding’s tale is as old as time — certainly far older than the movie’s 1989 setting — in that the route for women to agency, and to genuine control of their own destinies, has long meant navigating a world moulded by and for men. Indeed, when Lou and Jackie first meet, local meatheads try to stake a claim to the newcomer instead. Only by countering implied violence and verbal slurs with punches can this couple even carve out a space to start their romance.
Glass knows that this is a pattern, and usually an inescapable one. Lou works, begrudgingly, for her despised father Lou Snr (Ed Harris), at as arm’s length as the ruthless gun-runner will permit. Jackie lands a job waitressing at Lou Snr’s shooting range only by sleeping with Lou’s slimy brother-in-law JJ (Dave Franco), in one of his breaks from brutally abusing his doting wife Beth (Jena Malone).
How can a love forged within this patriarchal powder keg truly catch alight? The better question: what will happen when it explodes? After Lou and Jackie’s relationship heats up through a mix of steroids (to help prepare for the Las Vegas bodybuilding competition that Jackie is en route to), sex (frequent and feverish) and a place to stay (complete with a cat), plus yolky morning-after omelettes and chocolate protein shakes slurped off Jackie’s muscular chest, neither takes any threats to their hard-won happiness lightly.
In the girl-meets-girl, girl-fights-to-keep-girl way, Love Lies Bleeding’s basic plot is straightforward. Still, as she initially demonstrated with her equally exceptional debut feature Saint Maud, a claustrophobic religious horror about the lengths that a nurse is willing to go to for a patient’s salvation, there’s nothing simplistic about how Glass fleshes out her characters’ plights and plunges into their perspectives. With her sophomore film – and hell of a calling card – she isn’t afraid to get lurid, let moments of body horror pop, embrace the surreal, or find an inventive method to convey how Lou and Jackie’s bond, in both love and fury, dwarves everything around them.
There’s also nothing standard about the way that Glass strips away facades, especially when Stewart is in front of her lens, reimagined as Love Lies Bleeding’s sultry heartthrob. What a way to mark a quarter-century since the actor’s first-ever on-screen part, an uncredited appearance in a Disney TV movie at the age of nine. What an illustration, and not for the only time, of how Stewart has used her Twilight phase as a launchpad to embrace truly inspired roles afterwards.
As Lou, Stewart is Love Lies Bleeding’s dreamboat, with her ex-hookup Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov) already smitten to the point of obsession before Jackie enters the picture. She’s an actions-speak-louder type, as well as a realist who’s supremely resourceful, particularly at manoeuvring circumstances to her advantage. If the movie was about a heterosexual couple, you could see her Twilight co-star Robert Pattinson in the part instead. The fact that Love Lies Bleeding shares a nervy, unrelenting sense of tension with Good Time, his own crime-thriller highlight directed by Uncut Gems pair Josh and Benny Safdie, only solidifies that observation.
Stewart and Pattinson have traversed parallel paths since their time bringing Stephenie Meyer’s vampire romance saga to life — when he glittered physically but she shone, despite bearing the brunt of the franchise’s fondness for cliches, at expressing a commitment to desire while never shying away from vulnerability. The list of filmmakers that they’ve worked with is every actor’s dream. The range they’ve each displayed, and the eagerness with which they’ve both immersed themselves in as broad and challenging an array of projects as possible, has been career-changing.
What Love Lies Bleeding uniquely unlocks in Stewart, however, is that crucial mix of eagerness and exposure – craving and sensitivity, too – that made her Twilight’s ideal heroine, but with grit, blood, guts and brawn blasting away YA’s ultra-polished sheen. This isn’t the first time that she’s been pulled to again explore what it means to desire, and what it reveals and risks, after slipping out of Bella Swan’s shoes. The same ideas have pulsed within movies as diverse as underappreciated biopic Seberg, charming Christmas rom-com Happiest Season, Princess Diana drama Spencer and David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future. Even when Stewart has picked up a deserved Oscar nomination for her efforts, though, as transforming into a British royal brought, nothing has matched Love Lies Bleeding for raw, visceral potency.
In showcasing her lead at her very best, Glass also makes the most of Stewart’s knack for internalised emotion (see also: Clouds of Sils Maria, Certain Women, Personal Shopper) and her effortless charisma (Adventureland, Charlie’s Angels). She capitalises upon her can-do resolve (The Runaways, Underwater), wise-beyond-her-years smarts (Panic Room) and boldness (Stewart’s outstanding directorial debut The Chronology of Water) as well.
Weaving such an array of Stewart’s many facets as an actor into one unforgettable part and film, providing the canvas for a phenomenal performance that has viewers swooning alongside Jackie? That’s Love Lies Bleeding’s scorching gift not just to Stewart, but to the world.
Love Lies Bleeding is now streaming at SBS On Demand.
