“Some people say less is more… I am not one of those people.” Rose Glass is a startling filmmaker, but this is the least surprising statement she’s made. We’re at Glasgow Film Festival, the morning after her wild new movie Love Lies Bleeding has received a rapturous welcome at its UK premiere, and the fast-rising writer-director is explaining her desire to always “take a big swing”.
If you saw her first feature, the chilling horror Saint Maud, you’ll already know Glass’s palette runs to the shocking, the lurid, the eccentric, the melodramatic. Featuring elements of both body and religious horror, the English director’s debut was an unnerving story of faith, madness, death and salvation in the fading seaside town of Scarborough. It signalled the arrival of a serious new talent.
Her second finds us in a very different genre – set in the dusty hinterlands of New Mexico, Love Lies Bleeding traces its lineage through Americana and blood-splashed revenge thrillers, but is every bit as heightened as its predecessor. Kristen Stewart stars as Lou, a lonely gym manager who falls hard for Jackie, a driven bodybuilder who drifts through on her way to pursue her musclebound dreams in Las Vegas (played with energetic commitment by actress, martial artist and former police officer Katy O’Brian). The pair are soon shacked up together, enjoying egg white omelettes and lots of vivid, sweaty sex. But their love nest isn’t to last, and soon Lou’s criminal family pull the couple into a seamy underworld of violence, drugs, betrayal and murder.
“Coming off the back of Saint Maud, I just really wanted to take some risks,” says Glass. “And, I guess, try something I wasn’t totally sure I could pull off or not. So that’s how it ended up wading into some crazy, thriller sort of territory. But the initial story hook was just that I really liked the idea of doing a film about an incredibly muscular woman. And looking at how and why she got like that. It seemed like psychologically interesting kind of territory.”
Since bodybuilder Steve Reeves starred in 1958’s Hercules, through Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, all the way up to the mega-stars of the Marvel universe, we’ve been used to seeing male film stars who know their way around the free weights. But for women, getting buff is still “a subversive act”, says Glass. “There’s just so many more complicated and often negative reactions associated with female muscularity. Male muscularity is celebrated. Female muscularity still shocks some people.”
Glass’s interest in muscley women predates the return of lycra-clad, Saturday-night heroes the Gladiators, though the timing of the film’s release not long after the BBC successfully brought the series back is an interesting coincidence.