Love Lies Bleeding (2024)

Rose Glass returns with a sweaty, blood-soaked neo-noir set in 1989 New Mexico, and her interests have not softened. The film pairs Kristen Stewart's reclusive gym manager with Katy O'Brian's itinerant bodybuilder, and the romance between them is not a subplot or a gesture. It is the engine. Every murder, every cover-up, every loaded gun in the frame derives from the fact that these two women want each other. The casting makes the argument without a speech: a lesbian lead played by an out lesbian actress, directed by a woman, with a bisexual heroine whose desires are stated plainly and never apologized for. The film treats all of this as ordinary weather. Refreshing, if you have sat through decades of coded longing.

The body is the other obsession. O'Brian's physique is photographed as monument and weapon, and the film is genuinely curious about what a woman's muscles mean in a town of abusive husbands and crooked cops. Female rage gets a hearing here, though it arrives as genre texture instead of thesis. Steroids push the body toward horror, and the climax literalizes the metaphor with a giant. Meanwhile Ed Harris presides over a gun range and a criminal empire, a villain of inherited money and paid-off police. The critique of entrenched power is present but thin, the stuff of noir furniture.

Where the film could have lectured, it instead shows a corpse in a trunk. There is no sermon, no moral summary, no closing address to the audience about what we should have learned. It is pulp, and it knows it. A lean, vicious entertainment, notable mostly for how little it asks permission.