What if the Love Lies Bleeding fascination was just a blunder?

The success of Love Lies Bleeding came even before the film started circulating. First, it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival 2024, and then it received significant attention and a marketing campaign that focused entirely on the two leads, Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian. Posters, photo shoots, and entire imagery inspired by the film, all contributed to the buzz around Rose Glass's second feature, following her 2019 debut Saint Maud. While in the first case, the author experimented with horror tones, mixing mysticism and religion, with this work, named after a bright red flower capable of transforming pain and negative emotions into new fuel, Glass ventures into the outskirts of an obsolete America, turning them into non-places.

In these in-between zones, strips of land where events remain between the mythological and urban legend, the characters Lou and Jackie meet, engaging in physical, emotional, and carnal love, enhanced by the steroids the aspiring bodybuilder takes, introduced by her new coach/lover. O'Brian plays the role of a homeless young woman with dreams of competing on a Las Vegas stage. Her stature, sculpted chest, and toned thighs, arms, and abs served as further incentives to captivate the audience even before they met the protagonists in the remote town in New Mexico where the film is set, making it clear from the start that bodies, statures, and the ability to evolve are key themes behind and at the core of the film. A relationship in Love Lies Bleeding mixes the fantastic, as human as finding someone you want to be with forever, with another dimension where Lou, Jackie, and their story rise above everything.

There are two levels where the protagonists meet and yet another where the audience is placed. The first is entirely earthy, dusty, dirty like the places Lou must manage to keep the family business afloat (to the point of literally getting her hands dirty, as we see in one of the first images while she cleans an unspeakable bathroom), while the other is higher, chosen, a place for creatures nourished by love (the same steroids Lou gives Jackie?) where a visceral relationship burns, helping to leave the past behind and aiming for the stars. When you’re in love, you feel grand, as if towering over the world. In this rise and fall of stages, the audience will likely settle in the middle. On the one hand, embracing the impulsiveness of the protagonists and, with them, the athletic aesthetic, precisely scruffy and distinctly queer that accompanies them. On the other hand, always remains a bit distant, fascinated by the construction of an imagery that has captured worldwide attention, from the United States to the rest of the world, but perhaps, if you strip away the superficial allure, it reveals a simpler-than-expected thriller, with a relationship that is certainly instinctive but not visceral, almost bland.

The dynamic between the two remains one of the strengths of Love Lies Bleeding, along with the look of its protagonists and a potential that, however, remains unexpressed. It explodes at the end in the most cinematic and unexpected way, finding coherence with the exultations of faith in Saint Maud, and thus with Rose Glass's nascent filmography. But it results less ecstatic, for example, than the mysteries in the glitches of I Saw the TV Glow, another standout title from last year’s Sundance, directed by Jane Schoenbrun and unfortunately available in Italy only on paid platforms (it's available for rental on Prime Video). A modest story for a modest thriller, for a modest duo. One that will continue to make waves in 2024—and perhaps beyond—thanks to a widespread magnetism that has little to do with the film’s content. It's also true that, often, this is how cult classics are created, and we can safely say that it is not hard to believe this is exactly what happened and is happening with Love Lies Bleeding.