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Director's Spotlight: Rose Glass

Arm Jeungsmarn
Apr 8, 20246 min read

Three months into the year, I can finally say that of all the films whose release date is firmly in 2024 (which means The Boy and the Heron and Perfect Days are excluded), Rose Glass’ Love Lies Bleeding is my favorite.





I had been looking forward to Love Lies Bleeding since its announcement. Glass had made an impressive debut with 2019’s Saint Maude. She had proven herself to be a great writer and director, and someone with whom actors would want to collaborate (it was probably Morfydd Clark’s titular performance in Saint Maude that got her the role of Galadriel in the Amazon’s The Rings of Power).



A still from Saint Maude, a film directed by Rose Glass, released in 2019.
Saint Maude (2019)

(Credit: USA Today)


A second feature is where we begin to see debut directors really build their oeuvres. In Love Lies Bleeding, Glass expanded the size of her production, diversified her circle of collaborations, and matured the themes that she introduced in her early days of filmmaking.

Glass’ films dealt with many themes, chief among which are sexuality, violence, and subjectivity. In my reading of her films, these primary notions appear in almost all of her stories as a lens to explore toxic relationships.


But first, let us rewind the clock to her early days.



Rose Glass

(Credit: IMDb)


Growing up in Essex, United Kingdom, Glass was fascinated by filmmaking. She began making her own films at the age of 13, including stop-motion animations[1] a mockumentary about aliens[2]. Glass has said that she was always interested in strange things because she felt “bored and lonely a lot while growing up”.[3] Taking a retrospective view of her childhood, Glass noted in an interview that while religion was always around her (her family seemed religious, she went to a catholic school, and her grandfather was a vicar) she never really noticed it.[4]


Like other social norms, religion blended into the background of Glass’ early life, only to be noticed when she put on a more subversive lens. Her interest in subversive culture was reflected in her discovery of arthouse cinema in film school[5], and it’s been a recurring element in her films ever since.


Glass’ first film (according to Wikipedia[6]) was 2010’s Moths, which is a 10-minute short film about two neighbors spying on each other through a small hole in the wall between their apartments. Watching Moths after having seen both Saint Maude and Love Lies Bleeding, I was quite struck by the consistency in themes and elements Glass had retained over the years. First, we are already seeing an exploration of a relationship. I wouldn’t call the relationship in Moths toxic, but it is certainly unusual. The fact that two people choose to maintain a relationship on a voyeuristic level without physically connecting betrays a reluctance to trust which I find mysterious and interesting.


Moths is interesting in two other ways. The two individuals in the story do not make linguistic connections. They do not engage in conversations. They communicate via music, dance, and finally orgasm (more on this in a bit). The attempt to transcend language and grasp a more primal form of communication is the distinctive feature of Glass’ second short film Storm House (2011) which got her a place in the National Film and Television School (NFTS). Orgasm as communication also appeared in Saint Maude, in this case, communication with God (Glass calls this “Godgosm” which is hilarious). Sex is also one way the main characters of Love Lies Bleeding communicate.


The second interesting thing about Moths is its subversive portrayal of sexuality and gender relations. When the short film began, I suspected that this was a story of a woman threatened by a sadistic male voyeur. But very soon, Glass subverted this expectation. As it turns out, it was a two-way relationship. And one of the final scenes of Moths sees the woman masturbating to the sound of the man cutting and blending vegetables (yes, I’m serious). At the end of that episode, the blended vegetable (or fruit) splashes on the man’s face, and the woman seems to have finished. This is, of course, a subversion of how sex usually goes between a woman and a man.


Hence, sexuality and sexual fulfillment became a common theme in Glass’ stories. Her other short film Room 55 portrays a woman’s journey to sexual liberation in a more direct way. Room 55 was the film that caught the attention of people in the industries, and reportedly it was during the time of growing positive word-of-mouth for Room 55 that Glass began to develop the ideas that would become Saint Maude.[7]



(Credit: Esquire)


Since Saint Maude would become her breakthrough feature, we get the most insight into its development. The story of a religious hospice becoming obsessed with saving the soul of one of her patients grew out of her curiosity towards religious fanaticism. She wanted to understand the inner journey that takes someone towards extreme acts.[8] “We all live in the same world, but we’re all confined to our bodies and all experience reality subjectively. You never know what’s going on in someone else’s head,” said Glass in an interview with Vulture.[9] 


For all the critical success of Saint Maude, the filmmaking process was not easy for Glass. When asked how her debut feature seems so deftly directed, Glass cited obsessiveness and fear of failure.[10] She described sleepless nights obsessing over shots, mental health problems, and anxiety.[11] She mentioned a sense of isolation that affected her during the writing of Saint Maude:


“As I wrote I became more and more isolated and alternately anxious and depressed. I grew to hate my script, yet thought about nothing else. I was terrified of the idea of it falling through as well and going back to waitressing, but even more terrified of the idea of actually having to make the movie, which would surely be a disaster.”[12]

In 2015, Glass would make Bath Time, a short film about a woman taking a bath while her anxiety manifests itself.


Saint Maude turns out not to be a disaster. It was one of the best horror films of that year and propelled Glass into stardom in the world of arthouse cinema. Glass made it very clear that this success happened despite the aforementioned stress and anxiety, not because of them. She was not going to romanticize mental illness in making art.[13] 


In the aftermath of Saint Maude’s success, Glass decided to invite more collaborations in her filmmaking process. She did not want the isolation she had felt previously. Love Lies Bleeding was therefore co-written by Weronika Tofilska, who, like Glass, is an NFTS alum. Glass describes a far more enjoyable writing process, working with Tofilska to develop characters that would be played by far more seasoned actors like Kristen Stewart, Ed Harris, Dave Franco, and Katy O’brian.



(Credit: Los Angeles Times)


In interviews, she talked about her sound designs, selections of locations, casting, and selections of songs play into the development of this grimy world. While she cited deeply stressful and claustrophobic films like Persona and Rosemary’s Baby as inspiration for Saint Maude, Love Lies Bleeding draws on imageries that are more well-known to film fans, without specifying referencing such films. Nevertheless, Glass mentioned the transgressive films of John Waters and erotic short stories like Macho Sluts as sources of inspiration.[14]


In comparison, the things that inspired Love Lies Bleeding feel freer and more liberating.  

In my opinion, the collaborative approach and the larger (and freer) oeuvre of inspiration make Love Lies Bleeding feel like a more complete world. While retaining her interest in subjectivity and inner worlds, Glass can explore overlapping relationships and the multitudes of toxicity that come with them.


Toxic relationships were explored in 2011’s Storm House, at least in my interpretation of this very abstract short film. While I haven’t seen 2013’s The Silken Strand, based on what I’ve seen and read, I don’t think toxic relationships are a far-off theme. In 2015’s Bath Time, which sees Rose delving into something more explicitly of the Horror genre, she toys with the idea of the manifestation of anxiety. Even when dealing with subjectivity, Glass is interested in externalizing the inner form. This is even more clear in the portrayal of “God” in Saint Maude.


In all her past films, relationships are very isolated and limited, often bilateral. In Love Lies Bleeding, the central romance is essentially infected by a web of toxic relationships that surround it. Glass takes a step back from the inner world of the characters, trusting her actors to deliver the complexity through their performances. Instead of hearing Morfydd Clark literally talking to the voice of God (in her head), we get Kristen Stewart portraying multitudes of emotions in a single look. We see Katy O’Brian channeling her confusion in disparate movements; Ed Harris channeling evil that believes it is righteous; and Jena Malone channeling the tragedy of domestic abuse.


Love Lies Bleeding is very different from Saint Maude. Objectively, they are equally great films. However, I do prefer Love Lies Bleeding because of the richness of its world, and its portrayal of how love can be deformed in proximity to toxicity. There is also one sequence in Love Lies Bleeding, where two characters are simply driving. But the atmosphere and aesthetic of that scene are oddly transcendent. It immediately reminded me of The Place Beyond the Pines, my favorite film of 2013.



(Credit: IMDb)


The second half of Love Lies Bleeding loses the mix of tenderness and toxicity that makes the first half so alluring. In my opinion, that makes it a bit less interesting towards the end. But this does not take away from the quality of the film. As a second feature, Glass matured the themes introduced in Saint Maude and effectively cemented her place as one of the most exciting arthouse filmmakers today.



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