Love Lies Bleeding is one of the more defiantly lesbian films I’ve seen recently. Its defiance lies in the fact that it makes no effort to normalise lesbianism, or integrate it into the “realist” rhythms of everyday life. Instead, director Rose Glass seems to adopt a similar starting point to Monique Wittig, who in 1981’s materialist feminist manifesto “One is Not Born a Woman,” noted that “one feature of lesbian oppression consists precisely of making women out of reach for us, since women belong to men. Thus a lesbian has to be something else, a not-woman, a non-man, a product of society, not a product of nature, for there is no nature in society.”Glass’ film revolves around two characters who both experience this conundrum of not quite feeling themselves as women, even as their gravitation towards masculinity reiterates them as “non-men.” In recent years, growing trans visibility has tended to represent the space between the sexes as one of non-binary identity, but Glass’ orientation remains fiercely lesbian in focus. For her, trans identity doesn’t annul lesbian identity, nor exist entirely apart from it, but feels like one specific instance or iteraton of the “not-woman, non-man” lesbian continuum that Wittig describes.

The two characters in question here are Lou Langston, a gym manager played by Kristen Stewart, and Jackie Cleaver, a bodybuilder played by Katy O’Brian, whose paths cross in the American Southwest in 1989. Much of the first act of the film could be described as testosterone-soaked in a different context, and often recalls Michael Bay in its fixation on guns, gyms and steroids; the triumvirate of the modern American frontier. Nevertheless, these ultra-masculine symbols are inflected through a butch aesthetic, a subculture of “macho sluts” that sees Lou and Jackie meet in the midst of a workout, and bond over taking steroids together, before embarking upon a feisty and sensuous relationship. Much of their libidinal rapport involves negotiating gendered images and objects, most memorably eggs, which transform from harbingers of the feminine into critical components of Jackie’s workout diet, which Lou helps her prepare. The film disrupts a typical male gaze both ways – through presenting Jackie’s muscles as the object of an emulating male gaze, and by identifying the sexualising male gaze with Lou, who yearns for masculinity even as she is oppressed by it. This is one of Stewart’s best performances in that respect – her twitchy deflective acting style evokes a line of flight from every gendered encounter, and from the diegetic space of the film itself.

Like Wittig, Glass announces herself as a materialist feminist, focusing first and foremost on lesbian embodiment, and the ways in which the lesbian body commingles with the surrounding landscape. The squelchy soundscape suggests bodies shifting, changing and rearranging (Jackie tells Lou that “I want to stretch you – to see how far you can go,”) while Glass ruptures any residual realism effect by periodically resorting to topographies of such rippling muscle that they seem about to burst through the surface of Jackie’s skin and seismically rupture the screen itself. This leads to the main crisis of the film, in which Jackie, in a moment of roid rage, murders Lou’s brother-in-law J.J, played by Dave Franco, for beating her sister Beth, played by Jena Malone. Jackie and Lou dispose of J.J. and his car in the central topography or topology of the film – an enormous gash in the desert that is long enough to require a droning-shot to trace it across the land, deep enough to call the stars above into cosmic harmony, and embodied enough to exude a deep red light (“It keeps going down”). For all the clitoral connotations of this space, it’s simultaneously a catalogue of monstrous masculinity, since it turns out that this is where Lou’s father, Lou Senior, played by Ed Harris, has dumped the bodies and vehicles of people who crossed him. By planting J.J.’s car here, Lou hopes to frame him for the crime.

This chasm operates as a fissure in gendered realism, prompting Jackie’s muscles to start truly escaping her body. At a Vegas bodybuilding show shortly after the crime, she imagines muscles bursting out of her neck, and converging with the chasm, before she imagines giving birth to Lou through her mouth. Even more dramatically, the film ends with Jackie’s muscles rippling and contorting in sympathy with Lou, who is in the throes of her last battle with her father. Sensing that Lou is losing the fight, Jackie’s muscles transform her into a giant, allowing her to pin down Lou Senior and destroy him before his daughter’s eyes. The irrealism (or queer realism) of this second half of the film stems from a similar impulse to drag, hyperbolising and performing masculinity in the same way that queens do for femininity. In fact, Lou Senior already looks a bit like a drag king, performing masculine rituals that are lurid, grotesque and oddly artificial, whether it’s dumping the skeletons of all his victims in the desert chasm, or raising an army of stag beetles, whom he usually allows to wander over his fingers, but occasionally eats live in a burst of macho rage.

This irrealism is also, critically, emergent. While we infer that Jackie kills Lou Senior, we never see it happen, and don’t get much resolution on the other key parts of the narrative either. Glass also doesn’t go out of her way to make Jackie and Lou any more likeable – rather, their unlikeability within the confines of gendered realism also seems to be the point. Throughout the film, smiling forms a litmus test for how well people fit into this realism, and its division of affect between men and women. As a result, Love Lies Bleeding is driven by a series of escalating and uncanny smiles, or facial gestures – most notably, when Jackie condemns J.J. to a perpetual smile by smashing off the lower half of his face, and when Jackie is forced to smile for the judges at the bodybuilding show, in an echo of J.J.’s distorted visage. Conversely, the film remains sceptical of women who are able to smile as women, whether it’s Daisy, a femme played by Anna Baryshnikov, who is obsessed with Lou, and arrives at a particularly brutal ending, or Beth, whose rage at the murder causes Lou to grab her by her bruised face in their last scene together and finally call her a moron. And of course, Lou Senior and J.J.’s smiles are so ghastly that they seem to come from another planet.

All that adds up to a film whose gazes are continually awry, both within the diegetic space of the narrative and in its relationship with its audience. This is neither lesbianism as a fetish for the male gaze nor a straightforward reactionary gesture either. Instead, Glass straddles the line between lesbian isolation and integration, charting the same line of flight as Lou from every masculine institution in the American west while still depending upon them as her originary inspiration and point of departure. Aptly, Love Lies Bleeding ends mid-flight, with Jackie sitting in the passenger seat and Lou disposing of Daisy’s body in the middle distance desert, in a tableau that feels every bit as radically open-ended as the concluding flight of Thelma & Louise. In both cases, the couple have already left the framework of what the film can envisage, even at its most experimental, leaving traces of their passage to haunt and galvanise the viewers with dreams of what might be.