“AU NATUREL, BABY!”: monstrous urban ecologies in love lies bleeding ()

Rose Glass’s Love Lies Bleeding (A24, 2024) draws its horror and violence from unsettling and creepy elements, placing its characters in the interstitial space between fantasy and reality, self and other, body and environment. In its interrogation of ideas of nature and the natural – issues that have preoccupied queer theorists and ecocritical scholars for decades – Love Lies Bleeding demonstrates a queer ecological sensibility that grounds its critique of male violence and patriarchal oppression in urban ecological space. Lesbian embodiment is, therefore, deeply connected to the urban ecological setting and the ways that each character is grounded in or alienated from that space. Gothic transgressions challenge what is natural in a world where bodies are repeatedly strengthened, destroyed, and augmented through violence and substance use. Lesbian bodies, ecologically and organically bound to their environment as they are, are a monstrous site of power fed and sustained by desire and, in keeping with the film’s themes, revenge.