Cinema is more than just a medium of entertainment, but rather a living, dynamic form of artistic expression that changes as time progresses. Certain genres and styles of filmmaking remain evergreen, with only marginal changes in terms of the stories and presentation. In contrast, others have seemingly either gone extinct or evolved into something quite different. In both cases, there are forms of cinema that are left as remnants of the past, and only explored in a few instances, such as through engaging with film history, or in deliberate attempts to make pastiches of these genres, which are rarely as successful as we’d expect. This brings us to the enigmatic and brilliant mind of Rose Glass, who has only made two feature-length films to date. Still, both of them are extraordinary pieces of filmmaking that are incredibly original and very much indebted to a few different genres from which the director was extracting most of her inspiration, creating varied and complex artistic mosaics that are extremely daring and provocative in substantial ways. Love Lies Bleeding, her second film and the one following directly after her breakthrough with the insidious and bold horror Saint Maud, is a fascinating combination of psychological thriller, romantic drama and existential satire, following the budding relationship between a milquetoast gym employee and the mysterious bodybuilder who drifts into their small town and instantly beguiles our protagonist, leading them on a journey into the darkest recesses of the human nature as they slowly begin to realize the sinister truths that surround them in their day-to-day lives. A film that doesn’t always make its intentions clear at the outset, but rather one that pays a lot more attention to the specific details that sit beneath the surface as it explores deep and unsettling themes, Love Lies Bleeding is one of the year’s most ambitious and daring offerings, a shocking and intriguing dark comedy that is as bleak as it is genuinely strange that evokes simultaneous sensations of dread and desire, a rare combination that would feel out of place in just about another other work, but yet seems perfectly compatible with this film and its truly deranged vision.

Rather than allowing herself to be shoehorned into a single genre, Glass chose to make quite a radical departure from her previous film, at least in terms of the style and approach she took to telling the story. Love Lies Bleeding is very different from Saint Maud in many ways, and the similarities are essentially restricted to the director’s unique style of storytelling and her tendency to craft narratives around unconventional subjects, which she repurposes into something equally captivating and disturbing. We gradually start to notice the layers that went into this film by looking at the various genres to which Glass is paying tribute (or in some cases attempting to entirely redefine through the underlying message that simmers beneath the surface), which combines several different narrative and visual styles to create this bizarre collision of ideas and images that would be unwieldy in the hands of a less-daring filmmaker. Love Lies Bleeding has often been cited as a throwback to the gritty, pulpy neo-noir thrillers that have their roots in the New Hollywood movement, but started to gain momentum in the early 1980s, where their rise in popularity was attributed to a growing willingness of audiences to engage with these sordid films that intentionally courted controversy by presenting a vivid and disturbing depiction of the human condition, with particular focus being on the more dark and insidious aspects of society. This is certainly a major influence on this film, which uses these ideas as the starting point for a story that gradually evolves into something very different as we venture further inward and start to take note of the scope associated with the film. The film deviates from the earthy, gritty neo-noir style at a few points, and presents an almost surreal depiction of reality at times (comparisons to David Lynch’s Wild at Heart and Joel and Ethan Coen’s Fargo are not entirely off-base when it comes to how it challenges stylistic and tonal conventions), which speaks to the underlying existential themes that gradually begin to engulf the film, plunging the viewer into this unpredictable series of moments that evoke a genuine sense of confusion and curiosity in the audience.

Based on the effort she puts into making the film a bold and unflinchingly daring exercise, it was clear that Glass had specific ideas she wanted to implement since one simply doesn’t make a film like Love Lies Bleeding as an experimental mood piece, at least not without making sure the thematic content was clear and strong enough to support the weight of an entire film, especially one with this much audacity involved in its creation. There are a few different elements that are worth discussing, but perhaps the anchor to the entire story is the use of explicit content as an intentional narrative device – sex and violence have been a common technique used by male directors, especially when telling stories based around female subjects, which is an unfortunate trait of a very patriarchal industry that tends to view women as objects that are either desired or in peril. Throughout Love Lies Bleeding, Glass presents a version of this trope by combining them, and shifting the focus away from the male gaze and instead demonstrating how such a film would function had it been made from the perspective of the marginalized or underrepresented groups. It shouldn’t be mistaken as a film that is particularly profound when it comes to exploring gender politics or the dynamic between men and women in both social and domestic settings, but the entire film revolves around exploring a subject that we have become so conditioned to expecting to come from male protagonists, presented in a very different manner, which proves to be much more revealing and unsettling than we would initially expect from what seems to promise to be nothing more than an ambitious attempt to leap back to the era where these grittier, more gnarly neo-noirs were at their peak. Glass is fortunately not a filmmaker who ever feels impelled to explain herself or offer solutions to the quandaries situated at the heart of her films, so much of Love Lies Bleeding is left up to interpretation, which proves to be a very effective method of capturing our attention and placing the viewer in a position where we have to glean our own meaning from the ideas presented to us over the course of the film. This is bound to be a work that is going to lend itself to an abundance of conversation in the coming years, with its combination of feminist subtext and tendency to be quite ambigious in what it intends to convey potentially leading to a wealth of exciting and daring interpretation and constructive criticism around how these films are made and the exact thematic content that they represent.

Kristen Stewart was quite a prominent supporter of Saint Maud when it was released, and a collaboration between her and Glass seemed inevitable, not least because they both share a penchant for the unconventional, and Stewart has actively sought out opportunities to work with directors who possess strong authorial voices and some degree of originality in their work. Love Lies Bleeding proves to be the perfect opportunity, since it tends to be the kind of off-beat, daring genre film in which Stewart’s unique gifts are best utilized. Her tendency to play these quieter, more intense individuals who have opaque intentions and even more ambigious pasts has become one of her most distinctive traits, and it’s something that Glass manages to use as the foundation of this character. Stewart is joined by newcomer Katy O’Brian, who has previously only had small roles in film and television, a vocation she only embraced after working in several different fields. O’Brian is truly impressive, especially considering she has only limited acting experience – she’s a natural performer, and her ability to take on all the dimensions of this character, turning her into one of the most terrifying yet oddly sympathetic figures in recent film history, is beyond praise, and she truly delivers work that is both exceptional and daring. It also helps that the chemistry between Stewart and O’Brian is palpable to the point where parts of the film are propelled entirely by their clear connection. American cinema has gradually devolved to become more puritanical and conservative than it has been for a while, so it is truly refreshing to see a film that embraces the simmering sexual and emotional chemistry between two characters, while it would be peculiar for anyone to view Love Lies Bleeding as a primarily romantic film (unless it’s filtered through the lens of the crime of passion trope), the attraction these two characters have for one another, brought to live exceptionally well by the leads, is one of the main elements that give this film such a distinct and unconventional tone. Ed Harris and Dave Franco have smaller supporting roles, while Jena Malone plays perhaps the only moral character in the film, and Anna Baryshnikov is beyond terrifying as one of the film’s most sinister presences. Glass forces her actors into precarious positions, and makes them reveal their vulnerabilities in a way that would seem exploitative had it not been handled in a manner that was thoroughly engaging and meaningful, and for this reason alone, Love Lies Bleeding is a truly unforgettable character study about two women who fall in love and prove their commitment through engaging in erratic behaviour designed to potray their undying devotion to one another, even if it means becoming fugitives from the law.

Yet, despite a strong subject, both in terms of the exact themes and the inspirations behind them, and tremendous performances that anchor the film, the primary reason Love Lies Bleeding is so remarkably successful comes in the director’s efforts to tie everything together. Glass has proven herself to be as strong a visual stylist as she is a storyteller, and her films take the form of bespoke visual poems that carry a distinctive appearance and are the work of someone with a very keen directorial eye. Stylistically, we find that Love Lies Bleeding pushes boundaries in surprising and perhaps even slightly disturbing ways, and is constantly willing to provoke the audience simply to elicit a reaction. The way she does this is by making it quite clear that the film takes place in a very off-kilter and unconventional version of our world – it is set in the late 1980s, which gives it a vague sense of nostalgia, but also creates some distance from the present day, which is a common method of experimenting with stories that are not intended to be far-fetched, but rather have elements that indicate that they are also not intended to be taken as entirely realistic works. The 1980s setting allows for several fascinating elements relating to the visual and aural design of the film – the costumes, set design and music all reflect the era, and while never intending to be a nostalgic glimpse into the past (particularly because neither Glass nor her two leads were present for the period depicted in the film), it uses the past as a narrative device, much like all the other components that are situated at the heart of the film. One of the more appropriate descriptions we can give to Love Lies Bleeding is that it’s a mood piece, a film driven by the atmosphere more than anything else, and the filmmaking reflects the unconventional nature of the narrative, rendering some of these disturbing and deranged ideas in vivid detail. The humour is subtle but leaves an impression, especially when drawing our attention to the fact that these characters exist in an uncanny version of the past, a grotesque, dusty Southwestern purgatory from which escape is purely futile, and danger lurks around every corner. The story may pique our curiosity, but it’s the offbeat execution that pushes us into the heart of this deranged psychological thriller, forcing us to witness its many peculiar traits that are both scarring and scintillating in equal measure.

There is a certain delight that comes when we realize a particular film isn’t actually what we expected it to be at the outset, but rather something much more profound, whether artistically or in terms of the narrative. Love Lies Bleeding entails both, with Glass crafting a strange and slightly off-putting film that is as challenging as it is wildly entertaining, becoming one of the most daring throwbacks to a bygone era of cinema we’ve seen in a while. Glass has fully earned her status as a true cinematic visionary, and despite only having two feature films and a handful of short-subject projects to her name, she is already someone who is leaving an indelible impression through her combination of complex narrative technique and visual flair, which immediately establishes a vision that is difficult to ignore. It is not always an easy film, and it often seems to be intentionally provoking an atmosphere of hostility and despair, which makes Love Lies Bleeding a genuinely daring project that is perhaps best described as a rapid-fire assault on the senses, causing the audience to be put through the emotional wringer as we undergo the process of witnessing some of the most brutal and unsettling violence committed to film in many years – and even on this point, we find the ingenuity in this film, since the content is not all that explicit (at least not in comparison to many other films that feature violence and sexuality quite prominently), but rather when it is coupled with the themes of the film and the underlying tone that we begin to feel genuinely uncomfortable and disturbed by what we’re witnessing on screen. Love Lies Bleeding sets out to prove that there is a dark, sordid underbelly to the world in which we live, and that one doesn’t even need to venture much further than their neighbourhood to find these sinister forces guiding the lives of the residents – whether greed, fury or merely just the innate desire to destroy anyone who stands in the way of our goals, there is something profoundly dark about humanity, which is something that Glass has now explored in both of her feature films, with this one, in particular, being a broader and more unsettling portrait of society. Vaguely perverse in its vision, and driven by a genuine sense of discomfort and despair, Love Lies Bleeding is an exceptional and daring film, and a fervent exemplification of Glass’ brilliance in capturing a haunting and disturbing side of humanity, something that has been at the core of her work since the start, and which we can only hope and expect she continues to explore going forward.