Welcome to Life and Art from FT Weekend. I'm Lila Raptopoulos. The film Love Lies Bleeding is not your average anything, but I will try to describe it. It's set in the 1980s somewhere in New Mexico. Kristen Stewart plays the reclusive manager of a gym, and she falls for a bodybuilder who just came to town, played by Katie O'Brien.

As the two of them fall in love, they also get tangled in a web of deceit, passion, and crime.

It's a noir, but it's also surreal. There are guns and bugs and sex and implausible muscles.

And in the center, there's this twisted romance.

What is this place? What is this place?

Huh?

You don't understand.

Get back to the car.

They found a body.

It looks like you've got your hands, though.

Don't regret this.

We'll just need to fight back.

I'm going to tell them everything you ever did.

It is also all the brainchild of its director and co-writer Rose Glass. This is Rose's second feature film. Her first was St. Mod from 2019. And as our film critic put it then in his review, some debuts tug at your sleeve, others take your arm off. Rose is my guest. She's with me in the New York studio today.

Oh, that was a nice one. Rose, hi, welcome to the show. Hi, thanks for having me. Thanks for being here. It was a compliment. Yes, that was a lovely compliment. So I did my very best to try to explain what Love Life's meeting is about. You did a way better job than I ever do if I get asked to summarize them. I was like, oh, this stuff happens, and there's these girls.

That's good, but the bad thing is I was going to ask you to do this.

Oh, damn it. I would love to just know, it doesn't have to be the plot, but I'd love to know what it's about to you. I think when I had to email Kristen for the first time to try and explain to her what it was, I just said it's like a crime, romance, thriller, dark comedy, far, surreal thing. So it's something in that sort of territory. And yeah, it's a love story between these two women who, I guess, seem very different from the outset. Like, obviously one of them's an aspiring bodybuilder, Kristen's character, like, works in a gym, but kind of like sitting on her ass behind a desk, all day sort of thing. And, you know, she's kind of pathetically trying and struggling and failing to quit smoking. And I guess I've probably just fascinated by the idea of what it would take to actually get yourself looking like a professional bodybuilder. Yeah. And the sort of psychological traits it might take to sort of get yourself looking like that. And that just seemed like a love of love story between two people from those

sort of slightly opposite spectrums of ambition, motivation, life might be sort of psychologically

interesting kind of territory. I have to say in both of your films, St. Mod and this,

I felt so physically uncomfortable in my body that I somehow, like, wanted to

scratch my skin off and also laugh at the same time. I felt like Love Lies Bleeding was somehow

sexy and disgusting at the same time. I just never really have felt that, quite that level of nausea and anxiety and absurdity and sometimes sweetness. Yeah, hopefully. For me, I'm kind of, I mean, you know, I thought like, you know, I thought St. Ward was kind of like funny, but obviously a lot of people thought it was just incredibly depressing, but there's humor in there. So for this one, I'm kind of like, from my perspective, I'm like it's always a romp. But I guess the, yeah, the contradictory stuff is

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