‘Love Lies Bleeding’ Is a Sketchy Nod to Queer Cinema

Love Lies Bleeding (2024), directed by Rose Glass, is a film about a queer romance that goes horribly, murderously wrong. Set against the backdrop of a violently homophobic 1980s US, the film reimagines queerness in society at that time, exploring how violence infiltrates all areas of the relationship between the central protagonists: Lou (Kristen Stewart) and Jackie (Katy M. O’Brian). Glass’s movie builds upon the tradition of the 1990s independent filmmaking that B. Ruby Rich called the ‘New Queer Cinema’ in a landmark 1992 essay in the Village Voice. What the film says about current feelings around queer communities, however, feels woefully unclear at present.

‘Where do you want it?’ Lou asks her soon-to-be lover the bodybuilder Jackie, as she prepares to inject steroids into the musclewoman’s glutes. The two met at the gym Lou manages. As Jackie, homeless and new to town, is preparing for a bodybuilding competition in Las Vegas, Lou offers her assistance in the form of stolen steroid injections. The chemicals eventually precipitate Jackie’s mental deterioration, which culminates in a murderous rampage, yet here the interaction is portrayed as an innocent, intimate moment. The steroids also have a transformative effect on the film itself, acting as the distorting force for the hyper-disturbing, sensorily bombastic remaining hour. What begins as a story of two outcasts told in the style of a romantic comedy – complete with cheerful montage scenes – ends up descending into chaos due to the abusive actions of Lou’s brother-in-law JJ (Dave Franco), who regularly attacks his wife, Lou’s sister. Fuelled by love and rage, catalysed by the steroids, Jackie takes justice into her own hands and murders JJ.

Lou and Jackie’s relationship seems to be the kindling that sets old tensions alight. With Lou’s estranged father, the head of a powerful crime family, the two women find themselves in a situation larger than the two of them, to which they respond by enacting crazed violence on others, seemingly without agency or impulse control. The result feels like a lame attempt to subvert the portrayal of lesbians as deviant defective characters, prone to isolation and dangerous behaviour, without quite making the constructivist link to the conditions of the society informing their identities.

The harm perpetrated by the male characters in Love Lies Bleeding mirrors the violence of 1980s society, as well as the reductive expectations under which queer women were forced to labour. In the scenes after JJ’s murder, her father Lou Sr. (Ed Harris) offers protection on the conditions that Lou re-enter the criminal fold and fall in line.  Instead Lou tries to implicate her father and expose his past, leading to him putting out a hit on her and kidnapping Jackie to manipulate her. It’s clear that Glass seems to want to convey a kind of anti-establishment sentiment, but the film doesn’t quite bear its weight, mainly due to the lack of introspection on the part of any of the characters, who seem beguiled by forces unclear to them and the viewer.

In her writing on the new queer cinema, Rich describes a cinema whose queerness is intentional, ‘no more arbitrary than [its] aesthetics,’ but which is neither reducible to its queerness nor posing as some kind of universal story beyond the queer. While the new queer cinema sought to de-essentialize the queer subject, recent queer crime films such as Love Lies Bleeding, as well as Bottoms (2023) and Drive Away Dolls (2024) don’t seem to have the same preoccupations, relying on stereotypes and borrowed imagery. In Love Lies Bleeding we are given no clear indication as to whether Jackie and Lou’s behaviour is rooted in conscious, active rebellion or is instinctual and uncontained. They evoke classic tropes, moving in together immediately and aiming to control and own one another, with Lou lying to Jackie about stealing the steroids and also locking Jackie in a house at one point, while Jackie lies to Lou about sleeping with JJ. There is no clear acknowledgment of these problematic behaviours, nor a sense of why the two would be drawn to each other, except for their position as queer outsiders. Their attraction feels born out of their mutual need for escape.

I left the theatre thinking about the sinister effect created by Glass’s direction. It made me reflect on queerness in life more broadly. The experiences of the film’s queer characters are marked by fear and darkness, defined by a ubiquitous sense of threat; the film underlines the paramount importance of safeguarding queer people and queer identities in the present moment. Festivals such as last year’s ‘Be Gay Do Crime’ at the BFI celebrate violent queer cinema, as did a similar series at the Nitehawk cinema in Brooklyn the year before. In doing so they remind us of the mostly male directorial lineage of the genre; I wonder whether this film, along with others such as Bottoms and Drive Away Dolls, does much to contribute or speak to the queer experience of today, despite all three being spearheaded by women. Though she tells a queer femme story, I found myself wishing that Glass would offer a clear commentary on the trope of the butch femme, offering us more opportunity to reflect on whether she is the victim of society’s expectations of women like her, or the monster we all fear.

^{Main image: Rose Glass, Love Lies Bleeding (detail), 2024, film still. Courtesy: A24}