The last time Hollywood tried to push a mainstream gay love story onto audiences they came out with the 2022 film Bros. In a film that was so universally reviled and ignored by mainstream audiences, Billy  Eichner tried to blame straight people for not wanting to see it despite the box office results proving that even gay people could care less about his love life.

If you paid any attention to the marketing of the latest starring Kirsten Stewart then you will probably know if this movie is super duper gay. Kirsten Stewart wanted to be so authentic in telling this queer love story that they even added a healthy serving of domestic abuse for authenticity.

‘Love Lies Bleeding’ is a story set in the late 1980s about a gym manager named Lou played by Kirsten Stewart who spends her day hiding from the world in between unclogging toilets.  When a Drifter named Jackie shows up out of the blue,  Lou is immediately infatuated with Jackie and the two’s relationship quickly devolves into sex and steroid use.

 Lou has a little-known Secret that she’s kept from Jackie,  Lou’s father who is the town Criminal played by Ed Harris has hired Jackie to be a waitress at one of his gun ranges.  Lou warns Jackie not to get involved with her father seeing how he has been involved with countless murders over the last several years. 

However, one night when Lou’s sister ends up in the hospital after being beaten by her husband,  Jackie lets her Roid Rage get the best of her which puts everyone in town down a path to cover up the trail of bodies being led beyond the way.

Let’s get some of the positives out of the way here. Love Lies and Bleeding is a significantly better film than other gay romantic stories on the sole basis that this film decides to tell a story.  The characters in this film are pretty well defined Which gives audiences a little more to bite into rather than the empty setup of having gay characters just for the sake of being gay.

 Katie O’Brien who many of you will know from Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and The Mandalorian is the standout of the film.  Katie plays the role of Jackie, an emotionally broken bodybuilder who lives a life of making one bad decision after another that affects the people around her the most. As a character, there’s a lot to like about Jackie at the same time many of her personal decisions make you want to smack your head against the wall.

Jackie ends up by far being the most redeemable character in the film despite being responsible for a few murders along the way.  Kristen Stewart’s character of Lou struggles with authenticity not because she’s not believable as a lesbian but because she’s not quite as believable as the daughter of a borderline mob boss. 

Whether intentional or unintentional, the character of Lou turns out to be the textbook definition of daddy issues, giving us the picture that Lou never had a chance at a normal life given who raised her. The film has a great Pace towards the second half of the movie but is a rough road before you get there.

The biggest flaw with a lot of LGBTQ love stories it’s the simple fact that even from an LGBTQ-friendly perspective the writers often pervert lust for love. The first 40 minutes of the film fill time with a lot of introductions and plenty of gratuitous sex scenes in between. The story is trying to portray to its audience that these two characters are falling in love with one another however with the more traumatic elements of the story sprinkled in by the time you get to the film’s conclusion you don’t truly buy that any of these characters have earned what could be considered as love.

When our two characters finally stop banging each other,  the film focuses on two mentally unstable characters In a slow-paced downward spiral of their lives.  Because this is an A24 movie there’s going to be some division about the artistic choices of this movie, especially the film’s ending which could be a win from some audiences but at the same time pull other audience members out.

Writer and director Rose Glass certainly deserves some credit for being able to tell a more coherent story than a lot of predecessors have done.  At the end of the day, Love Lies Bleeding does more right than it gets wrong and gives Hollywood a solid blueprint about how films with gay characters should be laid out.

3/5

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