Dark, darkly funny, surreal and nauseatingly violent, “Love Lies Bleeding” is a serious shock to the system. “Saint Maud” writer-director Rose Glass’s second feature delivers jolts, grim jokes and grisly killings in a queer noir thriller brimming over with “Bound” and “Blood Simple” touches.

The viewer is left slack-jawed, tumbling from “Wow” to “Wait, WHAT?” in a furious roller coast ride with a roid raging fury and the hard-nosed, “practical” woman who loves her.

It’s 1989 and the Berlin Wall is about to come down. But in this corner of BFE, New Mexico, life is boiled down to the honky tonk, the shooting range and the gym. That’s where Lou (Kristen Stewart) presides. She’s an unsentimental lesbian with a clean-the-toilets job and a fangirling, brown-toothed lover (Anna Baryshnikov) she’d rather keep at arm’s length. Maybe two arm’s lengths, if she’s being honest.

We don’t see Jackie, played by martial artist/stunt-woman turned actress Katy O’Brian, roll into town. We meet her sexing-up a creep (Dave Franco) in douche dude’s Camaro because he can put in a good word for her regarding a job.

Jackie is jacked. She is also homeless, sleeping under a bridge, working out hanging from parts of the highway overpass she’s sleeping under. The job is at the shooting range, a job she secures despite admitting to the owner she doesn’t like guns.

“Anyone can hide behind a piece of metal,” she notes. “I prefer to know my own strength.”

Jackie is a body builder, angling for a shot an upcoming Vegas contest. She is headed for the gym, and not just because she’s fated to meet Lou.

Lou’s the daughter of the man she describes as “a f—–g psycho,” Louville gun range owner, Lou Sr. (Ed Harris). The F.B.I. is sniffing around, asking Lou about Lou Sr. and her long-gone mother because Lou Sr. runs guns with local law enforcement paid to turn a blind eye. And young Lou’s the sister-in-law of the cheating, rat-tailed J.J. (Franco) Jackie had sex with to score a job. J.J. beats his wife (Jena Malone), which is why Lou wishes him dead.

Things are complicated, and about to get more so.

Glass serves up lesbian love affair tropes — instant attraction, sex and post “first-date” moving in and abrupt “big future plans” with a side order of muscular, energetic sex. Because Jackie is jacked. And as Lou just happens to have steroids around, Jackie may have a Vegas edge, one with impulse control after effects.

The violence, when it comes, is shocking enough to snap your head back, queasy to the point of nauseating.

The crime might be covered-up, but Jackie is losing her grip on reality and Lou can’t hide their tracks and lie her way around loose ends with her brand-new partner only focused on leaving for Las Vegas and glory.

Lou Sr. isn’t going to like any of this, not with the Feds having him in their sights.

Glass and co-writer Weronika Tolfiska don’t hide where this is going, but keep wrong-footing us on the way to getting there. The layer of details, such as Lou’s self-help “Stop Smoking” cassettes, to everybody’s hair — Stewart’s was cut with a weed whacker, Jackie is ’80s curls incarnate, Harris wears a bald-villain’s ponytail and Franco’s transition from mullet to rat tail is almost complete — help sell the reality here.

Until surreality kicks in, most of it seen through Jackie’s eyes coming out of Jackie’s increasingly unhinged head.

O’Brian a real find here, a dreamer toughened up by life who buries her family’s rejection under more body building, a woman whose “focus” is limited to one thing at a time. Stewart gives a rough, affectation-free performance as Lou, who has been through things, seen things and maybe done things that we can guess, just from her manner and her self-loathing.

The usually-grinning Franco is perfectly vile here. And the reliably scary Harris has only to scowl for us to recognize what Lou Sr. is capable of.

What they give us in the end, isn’t pat, righteous or “bluebird on a telegraph line” “happy,” to refer back to the Elton John/Bernie Taupin song that provided the film’s title. It’s just bracing and brutal, two people who find each other determined to punch through anybody who gets in their way, venal, violent and just-a-victim alike.

Rating: R for violence and grisly images, sexual content, nudity, language throughout and drug use.

Cast: Kristen Stewart, Katy O’Brian, Anna Baryshnikov, Jena Malone, Dave Franco and Ed Harris.

Credits: Directed by Rose Glass, scripted by Rose Glass and Weronika Tofilska. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:44