Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian are delivering a gut punch of a crime film.
The duo are at the center of Rose Glass‘ “Love Lies Bleeding,” which was one of IndieWire’s must-see films from Sundance 2024. “Saint Maud” writer/director Glass helms the drama about reclusive gym manager Lou (Stewart), who falls in love with bodybuilder Jackie (O’Brian). The hitch? Their romance comes in the wake of Lou’s criminal family and unleashes a murderous rampage.
Dave Franco, Jena Malone, Anna Baryshnikov, and Ed Harris also star in the film, which is co-written by Weronika Tofilska.
Per A24, “Love Lies Bleeding” is billed as an “off-the-wall, rambunctious lesbian love story” set in a suburban small town that has a “heightened Americana sensibility.”
The feature is a co-production between A24 and Film4. A24 produced alongside Andrea Cornwell for Lobo Films and Oliver Kassman for Escape Plan Productions.
Glass previously won the Best Debut Director award at the British Independent Film Awards for 2019’s “Saint Maud.” Production for “Love Lies Bleeding” wrapped in 2022, with Lionsgate acquiring UK distribution rights for the film prior to its Sundance 2024 debut.
IndieWire’s Kate Erbland wrote in her review that Stewart and O’Brian’s “crackling chemistry” grounds the film, complete with “genuinely hot sex scenes that more than prove the necessity for such sequences in films that hinge on actual human romantic relationships.”
According to Erbland, filmmaker Glass “tackles the human body as a vessel for pain, pleasure, and so much more, though the brutally blunt imagery that comes to dominate the film loses its power over time. […] Its saving grace: that you can’t look away (well, OK, perhaps you’ll want to look away during some of the film’s shockingly grotesque and ultra-violent sequences), and you can never tell where it’s going next. It doesn’t look or feel or move like much else, all those other cinematic comparisons aside, and the sheer scope of its ambition is enough to inspire awe. Maybe the most obvious answer is the best one: love itself is a drug. So is cinema.”
“Love Lies Bleeding” premieres March 8 in theaters from A24. Check out the new trailer below.
