The setting of Scottish director Lynne Ramsay’s dread-inducing new film Die My Love is a country house in Montana. It’s not a huge place, but it’s a sizable upgrade for a young, artistic couple from New York City to create, to make love, to refashion in their image. It’s the perfect, isolated space for him to make music, and for her to write the next Great American Novel. Maybe they’ll have a baby there, perhaps a pet. Paradise found.
But just as the property’s provenance hides a gruesome backstory — Jackson (Robert Pattinson) acquired it after his uncle committed an especially ghastly suicide — this bucolic idyll will soon unravel. In fact, Ramsay truncates the couple’s honeymoon phase into a manic montage in the first 10 minutes, a ravenous, punk-scored eruption of sexuality that wouldn’t have been out of place in the halcyon first act of Anora.
And just like that, a child is born, and celebrating its 6-month anniversary on a blistering hot day on their porch while its mother, Grace (Jennifer Lawrence), crawls on all fours on their front lawn, a feral animal with an ominous chef’s knife in hand. More such moments will follow, the couple’s domestic dreams deferred. While Jackson works a three-day-a-week menial job, Grace stays home, not writing a word, playing songs on endless repeat, talking to the baby’s stuffed animals, licking the sliding glass door, sitting in the refrigerator like it’s a toilet. Soon enough, visions we presume to be objective appraisals of reality morph into the subjective distortions of an unreliable narrator on the cusp of full-throated madness.
Die My Love is based on an acclaimed 2012 French novel of roughly the same name (Die, My Love), which Martin Scorsese read in 2020 and subsequently pitched to Lawrence’s production company. The culprit in the film, as well as the source material, appears to be postpartum depression, a condition that can affect up to 15% of new mothers, according to Cleveland Clinic, but one that’s seldom explored in the movies. When Grace is forced to emerge from her self-destructive bubble and attend gatherings with friends, fellow mothers offer sympathy for her mental health decline. “Everybody goes a little loopy the first year,” offers one. “I think I nearly lost my mind for the first six months,” says another, in the euphemistic language we all use when trying to comfort the uncomfortable.
Shooting in the square 1:33:1 aspect ratio, Ramsay frames the film itself as a constrictive force, hemming her protagonist into a formalist prison, and ingenuously deploying recurring motifs that allude to her character’s gradual untethering from reality: a horse that surreally finds its way to Grace, again and again, like a damaged spirit animal; a libidinous, partially imagined motorcyclist that stalks her property after hours like a specter.
The eerie, bravura nighttime photography, shot by cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, suggests an eternally crepuscular liminal space where the broken shards of Grace’s mind drift further apart. A nocturnal shot of Grace, from behind, as she stares at a sprawling landscape while wielding the same knife, looks like something out of a nightmare-haunted John Ford western.
Grace is far from the only troubled soul in Ramsay’s canvas of rural pain. Her in-laws, played in heartbreaking supporting roles by Sissy Spacek and Nick Nolte, suffer from dangerous sleepwalking and Parkinson’s dementia, respectively. “My brain just seems chopped up,” reveals Pam, who unlike Grace at least has the lucidity to describe her condition.
If Oscar is not already buzzing around Lawrence like a Montana black fly, it should, as the movie’s release grows wider. Her performance, riveting for every second, belongs in the lofty pantheon of mentally unstable heroines: Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion, Monica Vitti in Red Desert, Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence, Lawrence herself in Darren Aronofsky’s bonkers Mother! We feel it in every aspect of her person, from the way her jaw moves to the darting of her eyes to the toxic combination of crushing ennui and hypersexuality that she embodies.
As the narrative, like Grace’s mind, fractures, and her hospitalization grows more imminent, each shot of the seemingly healthy baby feels like a exhale — proof of life until the next scene. It’s telling that the couple, with one notable exception, never refers to the baby by a name. For Grace, a name identifies it as a person, with eventual agency. An unnamed creature is more of an abstraction to be kept at arm’s length, like the eternally barking and weeping dog Jackson brings home against Grace’s wishes.
But this is a family that will never be nuclear, led by a wife who will never be a mother. Perhaps Ramsay’s most potent recurring theme is Grace’s shame in her inability to bake a cake, that sturdy Stepford symbol of good housekeeping. It’s referenced first in lieu of the overly saccharine store-bought cake for their child’s six-month anniversary and, later, in the form of the untouched mess of a confection she brings to a party. By the time she bakes a perfectly moist object fit for a Pillsbury commercial, we can no longer trust anything Ramsay presents as real.
This is why, for all the damage she causes herself, her loved ones and her property, Grace remains a deeply sympathetic and tragic feminist figure, one incompatible with society’s idea of normalcy. Like the horse, and the motorcyclist of her dreams, and the somnambulist wanderings of her mother-in-law, she deserves to be free.
DIE MY LOVE. Director: Lynne Ramsay; Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Pattinson, Sissy Spacek, Nick Nolte, LaKeith Stanfield; Distributor: Mubi; Rated R. Opens: Friday, Nov. 7, at AMC Pompano Beach, Silverspot Coconut Creek, Regal Magnolia Place in Coral Springs and other South Florida theaters.