In the ‘Love Lies Bleeding’ Film, Strength Is Satirical

Kristen Stewart’s new movie just isn’t your typical story about “sturdy ladies” — and that is the purpose.

Love Lies Bleeding is a movie that thrives on contradictions. It’s each attractive and disgusting; delicately romantic however gluttonous with gore; set in a stagnant city but brimming with otherworldly components. Most significantly, its depictions of energy are purposely far and wide.

The A24 lesbian thriller, directed by Rose Glass, takes place in a sleepy New Mexico setting in 1989. It follows Lou (Kristen Stewart), a scrawny sullen fitness center supervisor with a stringy mullet, and Jackie (Katie M. O’Brien) a jacked-up drifter along with her coronary heart set on successful huge at a Las Vegas bodybuilding present. The pair meet when Jackie begins coaching at Lou’s fitness center, and the remaining is U-Haul historical past. (They transfer in collectively after one night time.)

From there, the movie takes viewers on a twisted journey stuffed with lethal crime, bodily fluids and a few fairly unnerving bug-related scenes. In a city the place unchecked male violence is systemic, their murderous journey is a scrappy, poisonous love story. Via all of it, power — buying untapped bodily skills, wielding power over another person, attempting to achieve management of 1’s personal ideas — is one thing that Lou and Jackie are always grappling with.

Jackie is the right instance of this wrestle; her muscle mass performing as a defend for her vulnerability. Of their relationship, she is commonly the one who wants saving. The stronger she will get — with the assistance of steroid injections and obsessive coaching — the extra mentally unhinged she turns into.

The aforementioned fitness center the place they spend a lot of their time is dingy and darkish, populated by beefed-up predatory males. The partitions are plastered with indicators that learn, “Solely losers give up,” “Ache is weak point leaving the physique” and different nightmarish edicts that come from the hardcore coaches. Jackie, in her She-Hulk disposition, is seemingly at house on this surroundings.

However as her physique bulges to unthinkable proportions, she enters deeper right into a drug-filled haze the place the traces of actuality are blurred. Her beefy exterior is however a superficial distraction from her position as a damsel-in-distress. She is each femme-presenting — carrying crop tops and Daisy Dukes — and imposingly muscular, embodying the 2 oxymoronic traits directly.

Lou, in distinction, is spindly and small however does a lot of the heavy lifting (each mentally and bodily). If she’s not attempting to avoid wasting Jackie, she’s cleansing up her messes. All of the whereas, many of the so-called sturdy males round them are both ineffective or straight-up evil. By flipping these tropes, Love Lies Bleeding presents a takedown of glorified cinematic masculinity.

With this narrative technique, it additionally works to subvert Hollywood’s requirements and expectations for womanhood, queerness and feminine empowerment. Director Rose Glass reportedly dreamed up Love Lies Bleeding as a cheeky retort to business stress to craft a narrative about “sturdy feminine characters.” According to Kristen Stewart, Glass took these reductive calls for actually by presenting a plot a couple of lady bodybuilder. The truth that the movie stars two publicly out queer actors makes it much more of a rarity in mainstream movie-making.

Love Lies Bleeding’s irreverence to traditional notions of energy and physicality prolong past the large display. On the movie’s premiere, Kristen Stewart leaned into suggestive sexuality in an ultra-high-cut hip-baring leotard. On the speak present circuit, she served a collection of scandalously attractive ensembles, from sheer stockings and latex suspenders to a pair of Grandmacore-esque knit underwear.

As Dazed famous, with these outré outfits, Stewart “[wielded] sexuality in a means that utterly excludes males from the dialog.” Surrounding the movie’s launch, these subversive statements have been additional immortalized as popular culture canon, from Kristen Stewart’s suggestive Rolling Stone cowl to the steamy photoshoot she and O’Brien did collectively for Them.

All through the story itself, power is extra of a query mark than an goal aspiration. Its greatest power-flexing moments are shrouded in paranormal confusion, and binaries of “good” vs. “unhealthy” are left bleared. It’s a delightfully messy journey, and due to its fixation on mocking power, Love Lies Bleeding can be a launch of feminine rage and a rebuttal on markers of masculinity.