#love a queer film that doesn't feel like reprocessing the coming out experience

[filmstudentrambles]

Love Lies Bleeding and queer stories for those of us out of the closet

If All of Us Strangers (2023) was a gay coming out film, Love Lies Bleeding (2024) is the opposite of that. As cathartic as a well-done coming out story can be, it becomes tiring when that one of the few queer stories Hollywood tells. It’s a nice change of pace to find an explicitly queer film that doesn’t get hung up on the whole coming out arch. Some of us have been out. 

Love Lies Bleeding is a lesbian thriller and romance. Kristen Stewart plays Lou, a gym manager at a small town in nowhere, New Mexico. Katy M. O’Brien plays the new-to-town, competitive body builder Jackie. O’Brien and Stewart give great performances and have strong chemistry. Their romance builds into something that neither are capable of controlling. The relationship moves quickly, reminiscent of the ‘u-haul lesbian’ trope, but the film is careful to avoid satirizing queer relationships too aggressively. The characters are both deeply troubled, resulting in a somewhat toxic relationship dynamic, but the film offers redemption for the characters that feels well-earned and realistic. 

Some viewers may be turned off to the surreal elements. The ending in particular might annoy viewers who are expecting a very grounded story. The gritty atmosphere and cringe-inducing body horror sets the expectation for a very realistic thriller. The film subverts those expectations with a whimsical surreal ending. This lends to the shocking sequences throughout the film. The whimsy does not take away from the intensity of the earlier scenes. Director Rose Glass seems to lean into the dark Americana elements. The setting of the film as a forgotten small town USA, which so often serves as the location for supernatural, paranormal, and unexplained events in popular media offers the opportunity to lean into surreal elements without subverting audience expectations too greatly. Of course, the town is weird and haunted, of course everyone has a dark past, of course unexplainable things happen- that’s just what it’s like to live in the middle of nowhere. 

At the core, the film’s focus is on the body. The views of O’Brien’s character Jackie lifting weights and injecting steroids emphasizes the diversity of queer female beauty and subvert heterosexual notions of femininity. The film incorporates body horror with visceral gore and truly wet ambience. The film is so so wet. The sweat, the blood, the fucking, the violence. The vulgarity of it all provides further representation of queer bodies and the joy and the horror that comes from having a body. 

The film balances playfulness and grittiness in a fun queer thriller. It provides queer representation that doesn’t feel like a therapy session or homosexual diplomacy for the straights. The performances are solid and the plot is interesting. The surreal ending is fun and continues the film’s agenda for shock.

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