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Confused as to what happened at the end of Love Lies Bleeding? It’s simple; Katy O’Brian’s Jackie develops superpowers, grows into a giant and saves the day.

You can read a certain poetry into it if you like; maybe having spent the last few years of her life trying to maximise her strength and body it was her love and fear of losing Lou that finally brought her to her full potential. This moment might have been a surprise but actually it was signposted throughout with her muscles bulging to extreme levels at various points prior. This could possibly be due to the dodgy backstreet steroids she was taking – off the back of a lorry, straight from a secret lab perhaps. Plenty of other movies have gone there, why not this one? Sure, you could choose to read it as fantasy or metaphor if you want but something stopped Ed Harris from killing Lou so to avoid more questions it’s easier to take what you see at face value. I can’t explain how her bikini grew to accommodate her increased size but we’ve got used to not questioning that with Bruce Banner’s shorts so no need to puzzle over any deeper meaning here either.

Potentially less obvious but altogether more satisfying is the reveal that Kristen Stewart’s Lou is able to forgive Jackie’s dangerous behaviour because she herself is a bit of a psycho. I love it when they do this in films. You are watching things unfold, finding it hard to accept something, in this case that any reasonable person would go along with what another character is doing, so much so that its bringing you out of the movie, then something switches and you realise the director was on top of it all along.

Whatever you make of Love Lies Bleeding, director Rose Glass is most certainly on top of it. Glass showed great control of the medium in her debut Saint Maud and here she returns with similar confidence and, as the scene referred to in my opening suggests, no interest in compromise or narrative convention. I believe the term you’d apply to this film by the end is magical realism and in fact it may fit this category more than anything because it is initially so real and then unexpectedly so magic. Daisy’s final moments resurrection might fit into this too.

For lots of people the question is going to be whether they can go with of this but for me the biggest hurdle is the characterisation. Somehow in Saint Maud Glass made you sympathise with the protagonist even though she was a truly dangerous religious fanatic but here I found it hard to really care for anyone in the film. Kristen Stewart brings warmth to the lead but I felt a bit distanced even before things took a strange turn.

Ultimately though I recognise Love Lies Bleeding as an atmospheric crime thriller, aiming a wry eye at a certain type of Americana and a particular kind of cinema. The direction and performances are assured and the ambition, overly bold or otherwise, should most definitely be applauded.

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The Ripley Factor:

As well as affectionately mocking the US, this film also parodies and goes past the idea of strong female characters. We are pretty much at the long overdue point where discussions of women in cinema are redundant, at least from the artists’ point of view and this movie recognise that. Yes, Hollywood can still nominate Ryan Gosling for an Oscar for Barbie but not Margot Robbie or Greta Gerwig (FOR BARBIE!) but in terms of the movies being made, most of them now have women who drive the story and are presented with no grass objectification. Consider Bond, Star Wars, Black Panther, Indiana Jones, Spider-Verse, Avatar, Ghostbusters and Everything Everywhere All At Once, and that’s without even mentioning the run of feminist parables like Promising Young Woman, Prey, Priscilla, Women Talking and yes, Barbie. It’s just not the same climate any more and this has all fallen into place in just the last few years.

There is nudity in Love Lies Bleeding, deliberately included in this context so as to claim it back from the male gaze. It is owned by the women and clear of titillation, representing another way in which a trope of sexist filmmaking is resigned to history.

This film may go big in unexpected ways then but it also does so in important ones and that’s great because this is the end point we have been anticipating.