Love Lies Bleeding isn’t the type of queer movie made to be palatable for straight audiences.
Rose Glass’s thriller, out in limited theaters this Friday, March 8, and in wide release March 15, follows two sweaty, grimy, and messy-as-hell women committing crimes and falling in love in a small town in the 80s. It doesn’t shy away from reveling in the violent and dirty sides of love, and it never holds back.
That’s exactly how star Kristen Stewart likes it.
In the movie, Stewart plays Lou, the daughter of a local crime boss and manager of a gym who meets Jackie (Katy O’Brian), a bodybuilder on the road to a competition in Las Vegas. Immediately, the two women can’t keep their eyes and hands off of each other.
Jackie and Lou’s chemistry explodes off the screen every time they’re together. From the first moment Jackie walks into the gym wearing her 80s workout gear, Lou is thirsting after her hard. From there, their attraction, and their relationship only gets stronger, more physical, and more animalistic.
“I think to stand up and be an enormous lady boner, erection, from a purely thoughtless, instinctive, physical, impulsive, real, natural place was so cool that we didn't have to explain our work,” she smiles. “We didn't have to show our work. We didn't have to explain why we have our connection because of our shared trauma or some conversation that was the catalyst for our cerebral connection. It's like, no, I wanted to fuck her, that is what happened.”
“And it's like, that's not the lesbian love story that we're used to seeing. And it's definitely not the female story of desire that we really have ever seen,” she says, adding that, of course, Love Lies Bleeding is inspired by previous films, but still manages to stand on its own.
“It felt like their connection was the perfect diving board for a story about whether or not love has a fixed definition. I guess it's two sides of a really violent coin. You know what I mean?” Stewart says, adding that two separate people will always have a divide in how they perceive things. “Are we together? Are we projecting? Are we codependent? Their relationship is bad, but then it's also worth fighting for.”
Stewart said the experience of getting to play a lesbian character who acts and reacts so viscerally and physically, and presents in a way that shows that, was a dream come true.
“Oh my God, it's so sick. It made me feel like a kid on the playground, but storybook style, how you wanted to feel on the playground. It felt like I was playing with my friends,” she says. “It felt really physical. It felt like any lesbian could relate to this. I'm sure the movie feels like it's very actionable. It just feels like it uses its hands. You know what I mean? It felt like that every day.”
