The first few scenes in Die My Love, the new film from Lynne Ramsay are a marvel of grim economy. We open on a long, single take of young couple Grace and Jackson (Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson) moving into Jackson’s late uncle’s house in the country. Jackson paces the house excitedly, seemingly still trying to sell his partner on their new home (“It’s not New York, but it’s ours!” he beams, immediately before discovering a rats’ nest upstairs) while Grace wanders in a daze back and forth past the fixed camera, her shoes crunching on the dead leaves strewn on the floor. We then cut to the couple having passionate sex on the still empty floor. Cut again to sometime in the near future; Jackson and Grace are still dancing in the kitchen, but this time we catch a glimpse of a baby bump. One more cut: a baby is sitting unattended on the front porch, while Grace crawls through the tall grass like a cat, idly wielding a butcher knife and furtively touching herself, seemingly oblivious to her young child’s cries. We can’t say exactly what happened in the space of that edit, but we can surmise that the good times are over, and that Grace is in a very, very bad place.
For the two harrowing hours that follow, we exist in that place alongside Grace. “The first year is always loopy,” Grace’s mother-in-law (a tender Sissy Spacek) coos, but it’s clear that this is more than simple baby blues. The house sucks, a rundown shack in the middle of nowhere in which, we learn, Jackson’s uncle killed himself through decidedly unconventional means. Jackson sucks too, almost certainly sleeping around while ignoring his partner’s own needs, the kind of guy who thinks it’d be charming to bring home a dog without talking it over first (you can only imagine what the addition of a constantly barking bundle of anxiety to the household does to Grace’s mental state; consider this my warning to the DoesTheDogDie.com crowd). Even these factors, however, can’t quite encompass the enormity of Grace’s existential crisis. By the time we meet her she’s clearly well past her breaking point, literally clawing at the walls as if trying to escape reality itself. If Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You presents us with a mother on the edge, Die My Love shows us one already hurtling into the abyss.
What makes Lawrence’s performance here so compelling is not that she’s playing against type; rather, she’s playing to type, with the dial nudged just a couple of degrees further into madness. Lawrence’s public persona has always been that of the quirky, shares-too-much Millennial, the lovable klutz who happens to be a glamorous movie star. Lawrence has tuned this presence toward mental illness before (as in her Oscar-winning turn in Silver Linings Playbook), but this may be the first time she’s truly weaponized it. Grace’s outbursts and acts of casual destruction are undeniably funny (in a blacker-than-black sort of way), but they’re also terrifying. In one scene, as Jackson attempts a mealy-mouthed reconciliation, the camera pulls focus to reveal that Grace is concentrating on making grotesque monster faces— not at Jackson, not into the mirror, but simply because they are emanating out of her. Grace enters every scene like a loaded gun; it’s not a question of if she’ll go off, but how, and how catastrophic the collateral damage will be.
It should go without saying that Die My Love is a rough sit, and not for those of weak constitution. Ramsay is one of our living masters of feel-bad cinema, the director of such Bleak Week staples as Morvern Callar and You Were Never Really Here. With this film, the bad vibes reach a fever pitch, as Ramsay places us in the maelstrom of this woman past the verge of a nervous breakdown. It is unclear whether some passages, such as a recurring tryst with a mysterious biker played by LaKeith Stanfield, are actually happening, or if they are merely delusions of Grace’s fractured psyche. In the end, I’m not sure it matters. What matters is the sensation of slipping into entropy, of being so overwhelmed by chaos that you lose your sense of self (Grace is a writer, but it’s clear that her creative juices immediately dried up with the arrival of her son). Grace’s depression is a cancer, one that spreads to seemingly every person with whom she comes in contact.
A lesser movie, by a lesser filmmaker, would frame Grace’s story as a wakeup call about the realities of post-partum depression, perhaps with a title card at the end filled with statistics. Indeed, Ramsay feints toward this sort of LIfetimeism with a third-act trip to a rehab facility. For a good fifteen minutes or so, it really seems like this will be what turns things around for Grace (“You look so well!” about half a dozen women at her coming-home party ooze). But the rot is too deep, and Die My Love has no easy answers for its main character’s downward spiral. Like the books of Otessa Moshfegh (who scripted Lawrence in Causeway) the point is the mood, to spend a couple of hours in the head of its tragic, deeply toxic protagonist. Die My Love is not a horror movie in the strictest sense of the word, but will still likely leave you in a daze.
Die My Love
2025
dir. Lynne Ramsay
118 min.
Opens Friday, 11/7 @ Coolidge Corner Theatre, Kendall Square Cinema, Alamo Drafthouse Boston Seaport, and all local AMCs
