Kristen Stewart is telling Total Film about the appeal of her new movie, Love Lies Bleeding, and her description doesn't pull any punches. ‘There was something so nice about the nightmare fantasy of, you know, throat-fucking your evil dad with your girlfriend, and running off into the clouds,’ chuckles Stewart over Zoom from her LA home as her dog, Cole, barks up a storm. It's days after the first of two films starring the actor has bowed at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival and Stewart, back in LA to shoot the cover of Rolling Stone, is trying to describe the allure of Rose Glass’ heightened-reality crime thriller; a film that promises to make audiences blanch as much as Maud's thumb tacks in shoes. It's a tale that includes bug eating, fingering, poo fishing, monstrous evolution and a luridly violent scene that is literally jaw-dropping. ‘She creates a vibe, doesn't she?’ Stewart asks with admiration. ‘She really does know how to build something – an entire world to immerse yourself in.’
Certainly, Glass made windswept Scarborough a creepy, foreboding location for a cautionary narrative of frenzy, infatuation and the fearsome power of driven women in Stewart saw the 2020 lockdown hit and knew she wanted to work with its creator. ‘We've really just started to allow women to make films in the scheme of things, if you really zoom out. We're not encouraged to make icky things. It's like, everyone needs to fill their marginal-content quota with affirmations or something. Rose definitely didn't feel inclined
