‘Love Lies Bleeding’ ending explained

The movie Love Lies Bleeding is getting a lot of attention for its explicit sex scenes between Lou (Kristen Stewart) and Jackie (Katy O’Brian), but it’s so much more than that. It’s a surreal love story served with a healthy helping of gore and murder. It’s a story about jealousy, drugs and self-discovery. It’s also hard to forget once you’ve seen it. Warning: the following article contains major spoilers for the movie, so stop reading now if you don’t want to know what happens.

This unorthodox film also has a pretty unexpected ending, one that’s left many viewers perplexed. Some parts of the movie are straightforward, while others break the bounds of reality and lean into the surreal. It leaves a person wondering if what they saw was symbolic or really happened. That isn’t as simple as it seems.

In Love Lies Bleeding, a solitary gym manager named Lou feels like she’s on her own despite having family nearby. Her sister Beth (Jena Malone) is married to a violent man named J.J. (James Franco), who regularly beats his wife. Her father Lou Sr. (Ed Harris) runs a shooting range and has a shady past and questionable relationship with law enforcement. Things take a turn when Lou meets Jackie, and the two fall in love despite their different backgrounds.

Jackie, by the way, is an aspiring bodybuilder who getting ready to head to Vegas to compete. There are some complications. Jackie used to sleep with J.J., and Lou is being watched by the FBI over her mother’s disappearance a few years prior. Lou convinces Jackie to go on steroids and it makes her temperament a bit shall we say, short. Once Jackie finds out that J.J. is abusing Beth, she murders him violently. His death and fractured skull become a sort of beacon that the movie returns to a few times.

After J.J.’s murder, Lou helps Jackie hide his body in a ravine full of other corpses. Jackie’s continued steroid use causes hallucinations and while performing in Las Vegas she throws up on stage and ends up in prison after a fight. Enter Lou’s ex Daisy, who blackmails Lou over J.J.’s death to get back with her. Meanwhile, Lou Sr. bails Jackie out of jail intending to frame her for all the ravine murders.

Jackie finds out about Daisy, confronts her, and shoots her in the face in a fit of anger. She shoots Lou too, but there are no bullets left in the gun. Lou Sr. then tells Lou about his plan to frame Jackie, but Lou counters by threatening to tell the authorities about the ravine bodies and his involvement with them. This causes him to hire a bad cop to kill her. Lou barely makes it out alive and then heads to her dad’s mansion to see Jackie. While Jackie is pretty mad at first, Lou calms her down and tells her they can finally be happy if they just stay together.

Lou Sr. isn’t going to take this lying down and points a gun at Lou and tells her he didn’t kill her mother, which is pretty hard to believe considering he had no qualms about hiring a cop to kill his daughter. He tells Lou her mom left of her own volition after learning about their crimes.

The Weird Ending Explained

Here’s where things get weird, but not that weird if you’ve been paying attention. After Lou Sr. tells Lou about her mother and it throws her for a loop, Jackie’s muscles grow and she becomes gigantic. She beats the hell out of Lou Sr. within an inch of his life but ultimately decides to spare him so the cops can handle it. The two lovers, now both giant, run through the clouds together. As they drive Lou’s truck, Lou realizes that Daisy, who she thought was dead, is struggling in the back. Jackie is asleep, so instead of waking her she goes to the back of the car and unemotionally strangles Daisy to death, either putting her out of her misery or killing for the sake of protecting the couple. She then comedically struggles to drag Daisy’s body into the desert before the credits roll.

So what does it all mean? For one, there’s a lot of symbolism. Jackie’s muscles grow a lot throughout the film, and in the final scene, her growing large is a symbol for finally finding the confidence she was looking for the whole time. She always wanted to be strong, and she finally got there. Her whole character arc is about finding her own strength and self-reliance.

As for Lou, we learn that even though she doesn’t speak to her dad, he’s still been somewhat controlling her. He owns the gym she works at, and she used to help him hide dead bodies. Her murdering Daisy illustrates that she’s not so different from him after all. Whether or not Lou Sr. killed his wife is left for the viewer to decide, but all signs point to yes. In an interview with Indiewire, director Rose Glass said she tried to maintain the right balance between the real and the surreal.

“When we were writing it, we tried versions where it all stays very grounded and real, and it just never quite felt like a satisfying resolution given the tonal shifts of the film,” Glass said. “It felt like we needed to do something that leaves the real world behind, perhaps practically speaking, but sticks to a much more sort of emotional reality. They’re so seduced by being back in each other’s lives. That running off into the sunset kind of feeling love makes you feel, and that you can do anything.”

When it comes to Jackie getting huge, she said she liked “the idea of Jackie being someone who feels invisible but aspired to create herself into this godlike figure, so we took it literally.” She also said the ending was very intentional. Glass knew the movie could’ve ended with the two driving off into the sunset, but “that would sort of ruin the whole point of it.”

The point of the ending, she said, was that “violence is completely cyclical, and violence only perpetuates more violence. It’s terrible and bad when anyone does it.”