This review of Love Lies Bleeding was originally published during the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.
“Careful where you sleep here, it’s dangerous.”
It’s rural New Mexico in the late 80s and everyone is glistening with sweat and desire. An ugliness permeates the landscape coupled with the threat of violence. This is the world of Love Lies Bleeding, Rose Glass’s darkly funny and queer neo-noir western about love, family and revenge. In the vein of films like Thelma & Louise and the Wachowski Sisters’ Bound, we are taken on an unforgettable, brutal journey.
The quiet Lou (Kristen Stewart) works at a grimy gym cleaning toilets and being bored out of her mind when Jackie (Katy O’Brian) and her impressive muscles saunter into her life. Jackie is a young bodybuilder from Oklahoma, training for an upcoming competition in Las Vegas and looking for a job. Lou is instantly smitten and a late-night hookup quickly becomes a blooming romance filled with passionate sex, eggs, and steroids. Lou — turned on by Jackie’s growing muscles — gets her lover started on the juice. Jackie moves and starts a waitressing job at a nearby gun range. But Lou was a loner for a reason and once this new woman enters her life, her troubles start to catch up with her.
Lou’s sister Beth (Jena Malone) is married to the abusive JJ (Dave Franco) but refuses to leave. So Lou stays, bringing her new girlfriend into the complicated family dynamic. And as if that isn’t enough, Jackie’s boss is Lou’s estranged father (Ed Harris) — also named Lou — and he uses their relationship to try and reconnect with his daughter. No one knows for sure where his wife is and two nosy FBI agents are curious about that mystery. Glass crafts a caustic web of familial and professional entanglements that threaten to derail Jackie and Lou’s love story. But it’s not just fate that’s interfering — there’s also the steroids.
Not much is known about Jackie’s past aside from the implication that she can’t go home again. She’s young, impulsive, and dedicated to getting as big and strong as possible. But as her steroid use spirals out of control, she starts to lose her grip on reality. Lou can see it, but she doesn’t want to let her go. And when Beth ends up in the hospital badly beaten, it sets off a bloody chain of events as Lou fights to protect herself and Jackie as they try to avoid the police and get out of town. Complicating matters is Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov), Lou’s jealous and suspicious ex-lover who will do anything to get her away from Jackie.
Full of twists and turns, Love Lies Bleeding blends its noir elements with pure body horror as Jackie transforms into something beyond human. Her strength both scares and excites Lou and their attraction to each other is brash and carnal. Stewart and O’Brian have explosive chemistry, gazing at each other with an intensity that feels both too soon and eternal. It’s almost as if fate has brought them together to look after each other. Though lacking in physical strength, Lou gets her power from love, devoting herself to looking after Jackie no matter what. Just as Jackie is addicted to steroids, Lou is addicted to her.
There aren’t many lesbian films like Love Lies Bleeding. Glass’s sophomore feature is a truly unique vision of two misfit women who blow up their lives and the world around them. Expanding on the themes of her debut Saint Maud, Glass once again explores the poetry of brutality and the transformation of the body for worship as well as pleasure. There’s no one way to describe the nature of love or what it takes to hold on to it. Even with only two films under her belt, it’s clear that Glass is fascinated with desperate women. Not simply to gawk at them, but to push us as an audience to descend into madness alongside them, if only for a short while.
Love Lies Bleeding is an exciting, instant classic that will hopefully usher in a new era of unapologetically weird lesbian cinema.
Love Lies Bleeding is now playing in theatres.
What is it about Saint Frances that makes it so special? One obvious answer is that it makes an effort to show us the world as it is. Our heroine Bridget (Kelly O’Sullivan) is a directionless 34-year-old white woman with who lucks into a nanny job for an interracial lesbian couple and their young Black daughter, the titular “Saint” Frances (Ramona Edith Williams). The couple, comprised of the religious Maya (Charin Alvarez) and the strong-willed Annie (Lily Mojekwu), are reluctant to hire Bridget at first due to her inexperience with children and general tactlessness. But after having their second child, Maya soon succumbs to stress and turns to Bridget for her youth and energy. To complicate matters further, Bridget quickly realizes that she’s pregnant and goes through a painful abortion while learning how to care for Frances. The juxtaposition of learning how to care for a child while choosing not to pursue motherhood for herself adds an air of melancholy to the film that cuts into the sweetness.
Saint Frances is a film bursting with empathy, from its sincere script to its storybook cinematography. With a vibrant color palette and luminous, sun-soaked imagery it is reminiscent of other recent feel-good indies like Stephen Cone’s Princess Cyd and Sean Baker’s The Florida Project. The film, directed by newcomer Alex Thompson and written by the film’s star Kelly O’Sullivan, is a timely update of the classic adult coming-of-age tale that has been normalized by decades of film festival staples. Saint Frances premiered at one such festival (SXSW) early last year and since has gained considerable momentum leading up to its recent theatrical release.
It was fascinating to watch a young white woman enter the home of two gay women of color and make a concerted effort to support them, without centering herself or her own personal experience. Though O’Sullivan is playing a character we’ve seen before — in Tiny Furniture, Frances Ha and countless other films — she sets herself apart by being a protagonist who listens to the people around her. Bridget is at her best when she’s observing, and her worst when she gets caught up in her own ennui. Every time she neglects Frances, the film is quick to bring her back to earth and remind her of what she’s supposed to do. One moment after she calls Frances a brat under her breath, the little girl falls in a lake and Bridget is immediately reminded that it isn’t always about her. But those moments are few and far between. For the most part, Bridget is good to Frances, encouraging her to be confident and have faith in her parents. Frances, in turn, like many adorable film children, teaches Bridget how to enjoy life again.
But in the background of this feel-good tale is a rich relationship drama between two mothers trying to achieve their own version of the American Dream in suburbia. Maya is dealing with postpartum depression after having their son Wally, but Annie can’t get time off work to be with her. As a result, Bridget functions as a stand-in wife for most of the summer, giving Maya as much support as she can. But she doesn’t know the first thing about motherhood and her presence in the house slowly causes tension between the couple. Luckily, Saint Frances doesn’t succumb to melodrama by splitting the couple up, but the film isn’t afraid to show cracks in the marriage. Oddly, I found myself thinking about the early seasons of Mad Men where Don was away at work all day while Betty managed the children while grappling with her own mental illness. That’s where the comparison between the two couples end, but the fact that I could compare them at all signals a shift in the kind of lesbian narratives we see on the big screen. Saint Frances feels like the beginning of a trend where lesbians of color can be portrayed as matriarchs of an average American family, with mundane and universal marital woes.
There were times while watching where I wished the entire film was about Maya and Annie staring down middle age together with their young children, just living their lives in love. In the few scenes where they are together, they exchange a knowing gaze. It’s incredible how much intimacy is revealed through a narrative that is largely not about them. Near the end of the film, Annie cries while telling Bridget how proud of Maya she is, and in that moment the film reaches an emotional truth that stretches far beyond its runtime.
In Kurtis David Harder’s Spiral, the real monster is white complacency. Picture this: It’s 1995, and a gay interracial couple is moving to an idealistic suburb outside of Chicago. The couple consists of a middle-aged, upper-middle class white man and his much younger, poorer black husband.
The white partner is recently divorced, taking on full custody of his teenage daughter as the mother escapes to Costa Rica with her new family. The black partner is a former New York City club kid with a tragic past and a desire to turn his life experience into a flourishing writing career. To see a story like this was a breath of fresh air at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival in a year when many of the entries were focused on examinations of the white middle class, with emphasis on the breakdown of the traditional family unit.
We have seen situations like this in horror before, most recently in Jordan Peele’s Get Out, but going back even further you can see the bones of horror classic The Stepford Wives and even the drama The Women of Brewster Place deep within Spiral. The conflict is based on the tension between assimilation and standing out. Get Out occurs in our current world, one that pretends to be post-racial when it very clearly isn’t. But the world of The Stepford Wives is at odds with a fantasy version of America that conservatives wanted to hold onto, one where the turning tides of women’s liberation and racial justice were seen as a threat to peace and the nuclear family. And given Spiral’s central conflict, I would be remiss not to mention the lesbian couple in the 1989 television film The Women of Brewster Place, who argue between assimilating to their homophobic religious community or maintaining relationships with their queer friends in the city. This idea that a “normal life” requires a completely straight social circle is a prevalent theme in Spiral.
Malik (Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman) is suspicious from the moment he and Aaron (Ari Cohen) arrive in town with their smartass daughter Kayla (Jennifer Laporte). He is greeted by his new neighbor Tiffany (Chandra West) with a potted plant and an off-handed comment about how she doesn’t “see a lot of” them in town. In that moment it’s hard to tell if she’s talking about gay people, black people or both. Malik and Aaron are the only gay couple in the neighborhood, but Malik is the only black person there, period, and his isolation is constantly felt throughout the film. Tiffany and her husband Marshal (Lochlyn Munro) play on that isolation with stock phrases like “love is all that matters” that placate Aaron, while making Malik even more suspicious.
This is a dynamic that often happens with interracial couples, on and off-screen. Despite the fact that Aaron is gay, his whiteness and financial security provide him with a level of ease and privilege not afforded to Malik. He believes Tiffany and Marshal aren’t homophobic with minimal evidence, interpreting their civility as a sign of being politically and socially evolved. In 2019 — where white people from both sides of the political aisle cry for a return to civility in the face of a violent, white supremacist government — we could easily imagine Aaron as part of that chorus, ignoring the fact that politics have never been civil for people of color. Aaron is the prototype of the contemporary white conservative, a stance with little understanding of structural inequality and the way that changes shape through time.
Malik, on the other hand, keeps having recurring nightmares of a gay bashing he suffered when he was young. The details of the incident are obscured, but the trauma stays with him and he’s likely suffering from undiagnosed PTSD. As he spends more time in the suburb, he keeps thinking back to that night. In the images we see him, younger, in a car with a young white man and they’re kissing. Later on as things get more dire for Malik, we see more of the memory: White men with bats approach the car, smashing the windows and beating Malik’s boyfriend. It’s unclear how a gay black man was able to walk away from such an incident unharmed — perhaps that wasn’t considered by the film’s white writing and directing team — but the scenes are affective nonetheless, emphasizing how suburbia is an unsafe place for Malik and how inconsiderate it is of Aaron to expect him to be comfortable there.
Fueled by fear and paranoia, Malik uncovers tapes recorded by the lesbian couple who lived in his new house with their teenage daughter 10 years earlier, in 1985. Watching the grainy footage, I couldn’t help but wonder if the film had focused on an interracial lesbian couple instead, especially considering that the main events of the film are only two years out from Ellen DeGeneres’ monumentally public walk out of the closet.
Though queer themes are more likely to be represented by women in horror, very rarely are lesbian relationships given the serious tone and consideration that is at play in Spiral, as well other queer genre films such as Stranger by the Lake (though the recent Knife+Heart is a step in the right direction). Still, Spiral’s inclusion of a lesbian couple within its mythos is admirable and bolsters the film’s prevailing thesis that all marginalized people have reason to be distrustful of the deceiving perfection of suburban life.
As Spiral progresses it becomes obvious that Malik is right to be suspicious of the neighborhood and the true horror of the film comes from how easily his partner Aaron decides to side with his white neighbors, allowing them to sow seeds of doubt into his relationship. Aaron’s fatal flaw is his inability to acknowledge the validity of his black partner’s concerns, leading to an increasingly nightmarish turn of events that could all have been avoided if he hadn’t put his whiteness first. Spiral is a horror film that reminds us that love and solidarity are active pursuits and lack of empathy often leads to tragedy.