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“Love Lies Bleeding,” starring Kristen Stewart as a gym manager in love with a wayward bodybuilder, is not for the prudish or the faint of heart.
Set in the late 1980s in an unnamed Southwestern location, the gritty, bloody anti-romance could be described as a cross between “Thelma and Louise” and “Natural Born Killers.”
The overwhelming power of love, both romantic and familial, is a theme woven throughout the film, which opens Friday. The central characters, Lou (Stewart) and Jackie (Katy O’Brian), find themselves in a romantic entanglement strangled by obsession, drugs, broken dreams, and an assortment of malignant narcissists.
The two women don’t fare much better when it comes to their relatives: Lou’s gangster father, Lou Sr. (Ed Harris), has a body count in the double digits, and Jackie’s estranged family has written her off as a “monster”. although the public does not know why.
At one point in the film, Jackie, coming off a steroid-induced rampage, speaks on a pay phone to a young woman, presumably her sister, and sternly warns her to “never fall in love.”
When asked what interested her in a project that feels like a public service warning against love, Stewart said she was drawn to the dark side of emotion.
“It felt like a love story that showed all the dirty, real, good, funny things, which are actually all the bad things,” he said in a joint interview with O’Brian and director Rose Glass. “Love can completely destroy you and others, and the most selfless decisions are not always made in love.”
Stewart also said, “There is no fixed definition of love. It is a means to justify any decision one may make recklessly.” His character certainly makes reckless decisions, including committing multiple serious crimes, for love.
What the film lacks in emotionally healthy relationships it makes up for in outright sapphic sex scenes, a rarity in mainstream films.
When asked if he had any reservations about filming such intimate scenes, O’Brian flatly said no.
“I was excited because I thought, ‘Wow, I can finally do something real, that feels more real,’” she said. “The most important thing was I just wanted to make sure Kristen was comfortable.”
However, O’Brian said it was “hard to feel sexy” while filming those scenes, because the house where they were filming seemed to be 112 degrees and she was forced to wear several layers, including one that “felt like she was wearing a diaper.” (although, according to Stewart, “it was a cute diaper.”)
“It was like once you got there and saw how silly the theater was, it took a lot of pressure off of you,” O’Brian said, “and obviously we worked with an intimacy coordinator and everything, and we talked about the scenes and the areas of comfort”.
Stewart said that most sex scenes in movies feel mechanical and unrealistic. She wanted to contribute something different to “love lies bleeding.”
“The run-of-the-mill stuff, like simulated sex, just do it, it’s very routine, and it’s like actors have this default thing where, like, ‘Okay, we’re supposed to kiss and have sex now.’ ‘That’s just not how people have sex and I’m sick of seeing it,’ she said. “Really nailing down the details and talking about the physical experience more than even seeing it, like verbalizing it, talking to each other, sharing space, like not having to break it up into a bunch of different shots, it felt like… a really incredible experience. It’s beautiful to offer an experience that was literal instead of fake.”
O’Brian added: “If anyone gets anything out of this movie it’s asking their partner what they like. “You don’t see that in a movie.”