Love Lies Bleeding blends various elements together into a surprising, sometimes effective, sometimes ineffective sapphic thriller. For me, the movie is at its best when dealing with the crime portion of the story where the bursts of violence ratchet up the tension, and Rose Glass' direction builds a sense of unease with these shots bathed in red and darkness set to an ominous soundtrack. It is in these sections that Kristen Stewart's acting is at its height as well, where her nervousness and frustration bleed through the screen. Katy O'Brian and Ed Harris do a good job as well, and their characters inhabit this drama well. However, the problem is that this movie also has a romantic element to it. And unfortunately, this part fell flat to me. I felt it was rushed, and the way it impacts and informs events throughout the movie to be unearned. Also, I just didn't feel like Stewart and O'Brian had as much chemistry together, even though they were excellent individually. Finally, this movie has a scattering of surrealism mixed in. Though I wasn't a fan of it overall because of how random it felt, I thought it was generally helping to build the atmosphere -- even if the thematic focus for these parts was not really synergizing with the rest of the movie. However, near the end, one of these sequences sort of took me completely out of the movie. For a movie that is mostly grounded, just having this random sequence at the end felt almost like a betrayal, and I also struggled to see its purpose. Because of this, the ending fell flat to me, and it allowed my more negative feelings to overtake some of the more positive aspects of the movie.