Review: Love Lies Bleeding

It’s about time cis people got their own version of Bound.

Some films are carried by their premise. Love Lies Bleeding is about Kristen Stewart as a lesbian who turns her life upside down for a bisexual bodybuilder. That alone could sustain the movie. So it’s awfully nice of Rose Glass and company to make this an absolutely batshit, decadent, horny, drug-fucked neo-noir shitshow. Anything less would be, if not disappointing, then inferior to this version.

Stewart’s Lou is stuck in Reagan/Bush’s America, going out with the most annoying and only other lesbian in town, doing steroids, working a dead-end job at her mobster dad’s gym in Albuquerque, maybe the ugliest city in America (also her mobster dad is played by Ed fucking Harris). In the background, the Berlin Wall is falling and Poppy Bush is destroying a man’s life to show America that crack is bad. Fortunately for Lou, she’s only on steroids, which help her kick her cigarette habit.

Lou is caught in a hypermasculine dystopia; her only alternative is to be a fucking stupid dyke. Overwhelmingly influenced by a psychopathic mob dad and her severely abused sister, Lou is a chronic enabler, someone who survives by ceding control to others while unsuccessfully trying to have total control of her life. Introduce a mullet and some toe-sucking into the mix, and you have one of the most fleshed out characters in years.

Like all the minorities of the Eighties, Lou is an observer; a neo-noir protagonist for the dispossessed muffdiver, someone who watches people get jacked but doesn’t participate herself. She’s an orphan of neoliberalism, cast out of Reagan’s America, a refugee from the War on Drugs. Enough of my fucking similes; go watch this roided up flick.