★★★★☆

104 min | R | March 8, 2024 | A24

Rose Glass makes a steroid-fueled queer noir about love and violence in the desert Southwest. Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian generate heat that could melt asphalt.

Lou manages a rundown gym in a small New Mexico town. She is the daughter of a local crime boss she despises. Jackie is an ambitious bodybuilder passing through on her way to a competition in Las Vegas. They meet. They collide. The attraction is immediate and all-consuming. Then the violence starts. Rose Glass builds a noir that uses bodybuilding and steroids as metaphors for desire that outgrows its container. The film literalizes this in ways that are bold and occasionally unhinged.

Kristen Stewart plays Lou with a coiled intensity that she has been refining for years. She is sullen and watchful and explodes when pushed. This is Stewart’s best work since Personal Shopper. Katy O’Brian plays Jackie with a physicality that dominates the frame. She is not a traditional movie star and that is exactly why the casting works. Jackie’s body is her weapon and her art and her destruction. Ed Harris plays Lou’s father with the quiet menace of a man who has hurt people his entire life and considers it business. Dave Franco plays Lou’s brother-in-law with pathetic cruelty.

Glass directed Saint Maud and she brings the same willingness to push into surreal territory. The New Mexico setting is shot with bleached beauty. The gym sequences are visceral. The violence is sudden and consequential. The film’s final act goes somewhere genuinely unexpected and divisive. Glass does not explain it or apologize for it. The score pulses with tension. The sound design makes you feel the weight of iron and the crack of bone.

This is a film about what happens when love and rage become indistinguishable. Lou and Jackie are not good people making bad choices. They are damaged people making the only choices available to them. Glass makes a genre film that operates on dream logic without abandoning emotional truth. A24 continues to find directors with vision and the nerve to follow it.