A wonderful career path to emerge out of the last couple decades is the child-star-to-weirdo-who-takes-weirdo-roles. The most obvious of these is Daniel Radcliffe, who just won a Tony Award for portraying the beaten-down best friend of Merrily We Roll Along and has similarly played Weird Al Yankovic, a corpse, and a neo-Nazi. But Twilight's Kristen Stewart is the strongest runner-up to the title, who since her time as Bella Swan has branched out into all sorts of independent and tortured souls. 

Love Lies Bleeding, the latest theatrical release from A24, is therefore the perfect vehicle for Stewart, who's also extensively discussed her own gender and sexuality journey since her teenage days surrounded by vampires, werewolves, and tabloid paparazzi. The film is the sophomore outing from Rose Glass, the English director who rose to prominence with her debut Catholic horror Saint Maud back in 2019. And it's a lot of campy, sexy, queer fun, even if it could go even further. 

Stewart plays depressed and reclusive gym manager Lou, who begins flirting with Jackie, an absolutely shredded woman (played by the absolutely shredded newcomer Katy O'Brian) who's a regular at the gym while she prepares for a bodybuilding competition out west. Unbeknownst to Lou — as the two fall head over heels for each other and really commit to the "lesbian U-haul" trope of gay women moving very quickly through a relationship — Jackie is working for Lou's creepy gangster father (played with appropriate skeevy disgustingness by Ed Harris with the slickest, thinnest wig I've ever seen) and has hooked up with her scumbag brother-in-law (played with almost as much skeevy disgustingness as a smirking Dave Franco). After a while of steroids flowing and familial tensions rising, the conflict comes to a head, and a hot-blooded vengeful murder takes place. And what a murder; Glass gives us all the bone-crunching, blood-splattering detail that we would expect from her horror-film roots.

So begins an increasingly tangled web of violence, murder, and betrayal, as the tight cast of characters circle each other, carrying out all sorts of misdeeds for all sorts of selfish and selfless reasons alike. A relatively small main cast allows each actor to build a lot of depth into the relationships of their role. Stewart's Lou swings back and forth on how far she's willing to go to help and support O'Brian's Jackie, and vice versa. Harris' father figure is obviously protective of his daughter, but that instinct is intertwined completely with self-interest. A rogue neighborhood lesbian, Daisy (played by Anna Baryshnikov with gross fake teeth), has an overt crush on Lou and uses insider information to her romantic advantage. Lou's sister, Beth (played by a relatively forgettable Jena Malone), consistently protects terrible men in her life out of a Stockholm-syndrome-esque sense of responsibility, which alternatively stymies and forwards the plot.

Because they're so overlapping, though, the conflicts become somewhat muddled, and tonal inconsistencies pick up in the latter half of the movie. This never becomes too big of an issue — especially because instances of extreme strangeness (people becoming bigger or smaller; characters hallucinating; vomit) and overt violence (more than one surprising cold-blooded murder!) each pepper the film and remain memorable. And the most important driving aspect of the movie, its central, steamy romance between Lou and Jackie, keeps strong pace throughout. 

Set design and lighting together do an excellent job of situating the story in relatively poor, rural 1980s New Mexico, with flickering yellows of a hospital, steamy blacks of an underlit gym, and dreary blues of a middle-class living room. Moreover, moments that should be celebratory, like the Vegas competition or final confrontation, are presented musty and obscured enough to introduce the moral grays of the underlying story. With the backing of a pulsing 80s synth soundtrack from composer Clint Mansell, whose resume is littered with equally dark movies from Requiem for a Dream to Black Swan, the feel of the movie is just as memorable as its content.

Love Lies Bleeding cements Rose Glass as an undeniable director to watch, serves as another notch in the post-child-stardom belt of Kristen Stewart, and is a strong addition to the queer cinematic oeuvre just in time for a delightfully unwholesome Pride Month.