‘Love Lies Bleeding’: Sex and steroids in Kristen Stewart’s wildest movie yet

Kristen Stewart is an irresistible generational idol. Boasting the most beautiful eyes in Hollywood, she has the eye of Picasso’s Guernica tattooed on her right arm. Heir to Jodie Foster in the Olympus of stars, Stewart played Foster’s daughter at the age of 12 in David Fincher’s thriller The Panic Room. Since then, her career has run the gamut of genres, from the mega-popular (the Twilight saga) to the complex and daring (Clouds of Sils Maria, Personal Shopper, Spencer). Now 34 and an outspoken queer muse, Stewart once again shows off her talents as the star of the wild Love Lies Bleeding, something unthinkable not so long ago.

The movie’s British director Rose Glass made her directorial debut in 2019 with the surprising Saint Maud, which combines religion and horror on the English coast and which earned her the label of a new genre visionary. With Love Lies Bleeding, she shifts her focus across the pond to dive into an uncultured world of rednecks and bodybuilding in conservative America where the imagery of body horror combines with the trash fantasy of Showgirls, Paul Verhoeven’s post-feminist cult movie.

Stewart plays an unkempt, greasy-haired young woman who works at a New Mexico roadside gym. Her life, which appears steeped in sewage and garbage, will hit a crossroads when a feisty bodybuilder shows up on the premises. But the torrid display of sex and steroids soon morphs into a violent revenge movie in which Glass deploys both the imagery of Thelma and Louise’s escape romance and the subversive body horror drama of Julia Ducournau’s Titane.

Armed with this cocktail of references, the director frames her crime drama in a 1980s aesthetic of humor and violence. Glass relies on Stewart’s charisma but also on the muscular sensuality of Katy O’Brian and veteran Ed Harris, in the role of the protagonist’s mobster father. The father-daughter relationship is weak, but Harris, a long-haired bald man who looks like something out of a counterculture comic book, acts as an unbridled patriarchal shadow.

In spite of all its shocks and thrills, if the plot of this sordid romance movie comes together at all, it is thanks to Stewart, who in addition to displaying her strengths as an actress, wins us over with her neo-punk queer heroine image.

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