Kristen Stewart and ‘Love Lies Bleeding’ co-star on bringing lesbian sex scenes to the cinema
“Love Lies Bleeding,” starring Kristen Stewart as a gym manager besotted with a wayward female bodybuilder, is neither for the prudish nor the faint of heart.
“Love Lies Bleeding,” starring Kristen Stewart as a gym manager besotted with a wayward female bodybuilder, is neither for the prudish nor the faint of heart.
Set in the late 1980s in an unnamed Southwestern locale, the gritty, bloody anti-romance could arguably be described as a cross between “Thelma and Louise” and “Natural Born Killers.”
The soul-crushing power of love — both romantic and familial — is a theme woven throughout the film, which debuts Friday. The central characters, Lou (Stewart) and Jackie (Katy O’Brian), are 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 dismissed her as a “monster,” though the audience is not privy to why.
At one point in the film, Jackie — coming down from a steroid-fueled rampage — speaks on a pay phone to a young girl, presumably her sister, earnestly warning her to “never fall in love.”
Rating: 5