This is the season of the New Thelma & Louise movies. We have had: Fancy Dance; Drive-Away Dolls; and now, Love Lies Bleeding. Three entirely new strains of women-on-the-run storylines, each especially updated with bold new voices and greater specificity. The thing is, Thelma & Louise (1991), that great old Ridley Scott road movie, is ahead of its time, it’s more fashionable in the modern context. Whereas Fancy Dance brought indigenous representation to its story about runaway girls and Drive-Away Dolls brought Henry James’ Drive-Away Dykes to audiences via one Coen brother, Love Lies Bleeding brings a steamy lesbian story about bodies and running away and towards each other, to the lady fugitive genre.

We thought it would’ve happened the first time. Rose Glass’ Saint Maud (2019) felt due to fill the space of the A24-adjacent pop horror movie. And it was alright, but for a variety of factors, nothing really broke through the way it needed to those next couple of years. But now Rose Glass is back with a bloodlust. Let’s cut to it: Love Lies Bleeding rules.

Why does Love Lies Bleeding rule? For all the reasons it exists. It’s a grisly lesbian love story about a gym manager played by Kristen Stewart and a bodybuilder played by Katy O’Brian. What happens is that they have to dispose of a body and get entangled in a familial crime saga, as layers of bloody history unravel, as the stage is set for a bodybuilding competition in Vegas. It’s a whirlwind, steroid-raging downward spiral of love and lust, writ large in bold genre terms.

Love Lies Bleeding is a horror movie as often as anything else. It wears its genre trappings on its sleeve but is not effectively being marketed as such. There is much more genre play than you might expect from the trailers and the early buzz about the movie. It goes to the fringes of dark spaces. It’s formally about bodies, which horror is specifically well-equipped to handle. It’s about getting big. And loving someone for the work they do for themselves and the way they make you want to be better, too, and by being together, the ladies in the movie stage a heart-pounding mess of a runaway story. It’s about women’s bodies, hormonal changes, birth, and so much more, and all of it is exquisitely wrapped in Glass’ emerging signature style — we might expect her to become a great genre stylist now — but we know this is the first step in an invigorating career to come.

Great genre movies ain’t hard to come by. They’re made in great quantities. But truly exceptional new voices are harder to find. Glass now arrives just as we expected her to be in the last movie. What is clear is her total control over voice and character, and the fascinating turns she gets out of Kristen Stewart, Katy O’Brian, and Ed Harris, especially. The film is tightly wrapped up in a bloodletting aesthetic and feels like a shot of adrenaline to the system, a big fun lesbian movie that is as violent as it is lovely and tonally unique. We end our season of Thelma & Louise reduxes with an absolute banger. Love Lies Bleeding is a thrill.

8/10