‘Love Lies Bleeding’ Review – Katy O’Brian Steals Show From Kristen Stewart’s ‘Queer’ Thriller
Love Lies Bleeding is Hollywood’s latest attempt to push a mainstream gay love story onto audiences. Previous attempts such as 2022’s Bros — a film that was so universally reviled and ignored by mainstream audiences that Billy Eichner tried to blame straight people for not wanting to see it — and Driveway Dolls, a gay love story that was only able to make $5.5 millions at the box office after releasing late in February because nobody was really interested in the story.
What sets apart Love Lies Bleeding from movies like Bros and Driveway Dolls is that instead of being a comedy, the former its hand at being a romantic thriller. If you pay any attention to the marking of this film, Kristen Stewart wants you to know that this movie is super duper gay.
That’s not an insult, of course, that’s exactly how Stewart goes about promoting this movie. She wanted to be so authentic in telling a queer love story that she even added a healthy serving of domestic abuse in order to sell the story.
Love Lies Bleeding is a film that is set in the late 1980s. A gym manager named Lou, played by Stewart, spends her day hiding from the world in a gym, unclogging toilets. When a drifter named Jackie shows up, out of the blue Lou is immediately infatuated with her, and the two’s relationship quickly devolves into sex and steroid use.
Lou has a little-known secret, however, that she’s keeping from Jackie. Lou’s father, who is a town criminal played by Ed Harris, has hired Jackie as a waitress at one of his gun ranges. Lou warns Jackie not to get involved with her father, seeing how he has been involved in countless murders over the last several years.
However, one night, Lou’s sister ends up in the hospital after being beaten by her husband, Jackie lets her roid rage get the best of her, which puts everyone in town on the path to cover up the trail of bodies that are being led along the way.
Let’s get some of the positives out of the way. On the sole basis that this film actually decides to tell a story, Love Lies Bleeding is a significantly better film than other gay romantic stories. The characters in this film are pretty well defined, which gives audiences a little more to bite rather than the empty set up of just having gay characters for the sake of being gay.
Katy O’Brian, who some of you may know from Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and The Mandalorian, is a standout of this movie. As Jackie, O’Brian plays an emotionally broken bodybuilder who lives a life making one bad decision after another — affecting the people around her the most.
As a character, there’s a lot to like about Jackie. At the same time, however, many of her decisions make you want to smack your head against a wall. Despite her being responsible for multiple murders along the way, Jackie ends up being by far the most redeemable character in this film.
Kirsten Stewart’s character of Lou struggles to be authentic, not because she’s not believable as a lesbian, but she’s not quite believable as a daughter of a borderline mob boss. Whether intentional or unintentional, the character of Lou turns out to be the textbook definition of daddy issue, giving us a picture into Lou’s life that shows us she never had chance at a normal life given who raised her.
Love Lies Bleeding has a great pace towards its second half, but it’s a rough road to get there. The biggest flaw with a lot of LGBTQ love stories is the fact that even from LGBTQ-friendly perspectives, the writers often pervert lust for love.
The first 40 minutes of this film filled the time with a lot of introductions and plenty of gratuitous sex scenes. The story is trying to portray to its audience that these two characters are falling in love with one another. However, the more traumatic elements of the story being sprinkled in, by time you get to the film’s conclusion you don’t really buy that either one of these characters have earned what it means to be considered love.
When our two characters finally stop banging one another, the film focuses on two mentally unstable characters and a slow paced downward spiral of their lives. Because this is an A24 film, there’s going to be some division about the artistic choices of the movie, especially the ending — what could be a win for some audiences, at the same time, be a loss for others.
At the end of the day, Love Lies Bleeding does more right than wrong, and Hollywood has a solid blueprint of how films with gay characters should be laid out in the future.
Love Lies Bleeding (2024), A24
PROS
- Katy O'Brian
- Bloody thriller.
- Well defined characters.
CONS
- Gratuitous sex.
- Early pacing.
- Ending.
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