Love Lies Bleeding 2024 Movie Review

『An Explosive Queer Noir Where Love and Destruction Collide』

🎥 Movie Overview

🎬 Title: Love Lies Bleeding (2024)
🌍 Country: 🇺🇸 USA
🎞️ Genre: Romantic Thriller / Noir
🗓️ Release: 2024
📢 Director: Rose Glass
🖋️ Screenplay: Rose Glass & Weronika Tofilska

👩‍💼 Cast: Kristen Stewart – Louise "Lou" Langston
Katy O'Brian – Jacqueline "Jackie" Cleaver

🧩 Story Deep Dive (Spoilers)

🏋🏻‍♀️ The Crossroads of Desire and Power

'Love Lies Bleeding' goes beyond being a simple romantic thriller, blending elements of neo-noir, queer romance, crime drama, and body horror into a fierce, bizarre, and muscular cinematic experience. Critics have highlighted its originality in direction, powerful performances, and bold thematic vision, hailing the arrival of a true auteur. The relationship between the two protagonists functions not merely as a queer romance, but as the spark of crime and a twisted narrative of salvation.

💥 Destructive Love and the Shadow of Domestic Violence

Set in a barren town on the outskirts of New Mexico in 1989, the film follows reclusive gym manager Lou and ambitious bodybuilder Jackie, who is en route to a bodybuilding competition in Las Vegas. Their passionate relationship spirals into chaos as they become entangled with Lou’s cold-blooded criminal father, Lou Sr. Lou’s rage is ignited by her brother-in-law JJ’s abuse of her sister Beth, while Jackie, under the influence of steroids provided by Lou, begins to descend into uncontrollable anger and hallucinations, ultimately committing an unexpected murder.

⚠️ A Twisted Portrait of Desire and Violence: Queer Neo-Noir

The film places a queer romance at the center of a crime thriller, deliberately sidestepping familiar themes like ‘coming out’ or ‘social discrimination,’ instead focusing on desire, love, and crime itself. Lou and Jackie’s relationship begins with raw physical attraction and sexual tension, while Jackie’s growing muscles and mounting rage from steroid use push their love into increasingly dangerous and destructive territory.

Director Rose Glass, who had already demonstrated psychological intensity in her previous work 《Saint Maud》, here combines explicit violence and sexuality to depict a love that feels like a “hot mess”. While echoing the classic film noir dynamic of the fated femme fatale, the film subverts the trope by granting both female leads agency over their desires and violence.

🔥 The Ambiguous Line Between Body Horror and Female Empowerment

Jackie’s physical and psychological transformation under steroid use is one of the film’s most distinctive elements. Her growing muscles symbolize the acquisition of strength and control, but also bring irrational rage and disturbing hallucinations. Especially in the later stages, Jackie’s surreal bodily mutations evoke 1980s B-movie imagination steeped in body horror.

This frames the theme of female empowerment on an unstable foundation of violence and drugs. While Jackie’s growing physique empowers her to confront a male-dominated criminal world, it simultaneously burdens her with self-destructive mania, sending mixed and unsettling messages.

🦋 The Spark of Fire: A Fusion of Solitude and Ambition

The encounter between Lou and Jackie is an explosive collision of loneliness and ambition.

• Lou’s solitude and control: Living under the shadow of her father, a ruthless crime boss, Lou has led a life of suppression. She isolates herself and clings to her role as a gym manager to maintain minimal control over her life.

• Jackie’s ambition and body: Jackie’s obsessive drive toward the Las Vegas bodybuilding competition is embodied in her muscles, which become the physical manifestation of her identity and determination.

When Lou hands Jackie the forbidden steroids, it becomes more than a transaction—it’s a dangerous vow that marks the beginning of their relationship. Lou becomes both a supporter of Jackie’s ambition and an observer and lover captivated by her strength and transformation. The raw sexual and physical chemistry between Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian floods the screen with primal allure and danger.

🌈 Love as Accomplices: The Knot of Crime

Their relationship takes a radical turn when Jackie kills Lou’s abusive brother-in-law JJ. From this point, their love enters the stage of “accomplices’ love”.

• Lou’s self-sacrifice and loss of control: Lou covers up Jackie’s crime by disposing of JJ’s body and even hatching a daring plan to frame her own father. This act is both an eruption of long-suppressed rage against family violence and corruption and a step into a realm of uncontrollable madness through Jackie.

• The transfer of violence and distorted justice: From Lou’s perspective, Jackie’s murder of JJ is both an act of justice and destructive love. She fears and despises Jackie’s violence, but simultaneously experiences a warped sense of liberation knowing this violence could free her sister and fracture her father’s empire.

By sharing the burden of crime, the two grow closer, but their bond becomes a toxic dependency that isolates them from all external ties.

🎭 The Birth of a Monster and a Body Horror Climax

In the later part of the film, Jackie’s steroid-induced instability pushes their relationship into the territory of body horror.

• Escalating strength and madness: Jackie’s body swells unnaturally, symbolizing not only physical power but also her spiraling mental collapse. Her surreal visions—vomiting Lou’s image at a competition or transforming into a monstrous figure in the final showdown with Lou Sr.—expose their love as a blind and inhuman obsession that transcends ordinary limits.

• A test of love: Jackie’s uncontrollable mania eventually threatens Lou herself. Lou faces the question: “Do I love you for who you are, or for this destructive power you’ve become?”

Lou and Jackie sought to escape the violent world of Lou’s father, but in the end, their love and desire themselves morph into another form of violence—a monster of their own making.

⚖️ Love as a Survival Instinct

The love between Lou and Jackie in 《Love Lies Bleeding》 is neither beautiful nor healthy. It is as arid as the New Mexico desert, as corrupt as Lou Sr.’s crime empire, and as grotesquely swollen as Jackie’s muscles.

Yet the film portrays this destructive bond as the only anchor two outsiders cling to in a world of violence and decay. In the end, when Lou and Jackie drive off together, leaving everything behind, the final scene delivers a brutal yet striking conclusion: love as a survival instinct found within ruin. Their path may not be morally righteous, but for them, it is the only salvation and true freedom.

🎯 Personal Rating

💕 Love Scene Intensity: ♥♥♥
⭐ Rating: ★★