Kristen Stewart’s on Fire: Love Lies Bleeding Ending Explained
The modern interpretation of Bonnie and Clyde or the story of true love?
Summary:
- Love Lies Bleeding, a neo-noir thriller, starring Kristen Stewart and Katy O'Brian, presents quite a metaphorical ending, including surreal elements.
- It mixes family issues, the nature of love and other moral dilemmas.
Spoilers Alert!
Love Love Lies Bleeding, A24’s new romantic thriller directed and co-written by Rose Glass, combines elements of neo-noir, sports and family drama, criminal westerns and, of course, passionate romance. Its brutal, but peculiar ending left viewers, who have already seen the movie during a limited number of screenings, thrilled and in shock.
It features gym manager Lou (played by Kristen Stewart), who comes from a criminal family that is holding the whole town in its hands by possessing an illegal weapon business. She falls heavily in love with bodybuilder Jackie (Katy O'Brian) and this romance is developing side by side with lots of steroids and crimes of Lou’s family.
Lou’s need to stay in town is dictated by the need to protect her sister Beth (Jena Malone) from their dad Lou Sr. (Ed Harris) and her abusive husband JJ (Dave Franco). She yearns to escape her father’s reach and run away with her ambitious love partner, who eventually kills JJ in a steroid trip after yet another violent attack on Beth.
Thus, Lou is somewhat free from her duty to look after her sister, but now she takes the risk of protecting Jackie, disposing of JJ’s body and covering her up. As the movie follows its final act, the number of victims involved in Lou and Jackie’s crimes gets bigger, who now kill without judging if the person has any blame on his or her shoulders.
The ending could be sorrowful for them as Lou Sr. found out what they did and tried to “save” Lou in a manner in what a criminal is capable of, but the surreal part of the movie here breaks out. Jackie turns into a fierce 50-foot giant having her muscles literally expand and burst out under her skin and rescue her partner in love and crimes.
Such a fantastic scene in a realistic thriller can be perceived as a metaphor for both Jackie’s love for Lou and the end of her transformation into a monster, killing the innocent indiscriminately just like a higher figure, possessing the whole town.
It also can be seen as a distortion of Jackie’s bloody deeds and her image in Lou’s eyes, who started to see her loved one as a bigger person in a literal sense of this word.
Love Lies Bleeding’s wide release is coming to theaters on March 15.