‘Die My Love’ Review

By Nadia Dalimonte

Jennifer Lawrence in Die My Love

​Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love, her first film in eight years since You Were Never Really Here, roars with a restless energy. It’s an all-consuming journey that demands your undivided attention. The story unfolds in a trance, peering through a woman’s soul and taking shape from inside her head. Playing in between realism and imagination, the auteur puts up a cinematic fight against the societal norms of domesticity. She turns up the volume (with exquisite needle drops) on a suffocating rural existence where unmet desires, a strained marriage, and a terrifying loss of self live.

Things weren’t always this nightmarish. Ramsay opens the film with hopes and dreams; a young couple expecting a baby move into a rundown, but promising, new house. We get an intoxicating montage of Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and her husband Jackson (Robert Pattinson) dancing up a storm in their new kitchen, boogieing into parenthood. The couple are surrounded by seemingly infinite space to grow, but Ramsay lets us dance in that daydream only for a brief moment. Once the baby is born, the Montana landscape, even with all its vastness, can’t contain Grace’s inner wild child. Nor can this new environment give her the creative spark she needs to continue writing. Fearing becoming invisible, she tries to regain her identity while engulfed in a psychological void. As echoed in the film’s most poignant line, Grace is stuck between wanting to do something, and not wanting to do anything at all.

Based on Ariana Harwicz’s 2012 novel of the same name, Die My Love visualizes a woman’s transformative relationship to herself and her surroundings. Grace has no problem attaching to her son. “He’s perfect,” she explains to a doctor. “It’s everything else that’s fucked.” The confines of polite society, and the expectations of motherhood, close in on her, and there’s nowhere to run. Tension manifests in her body as she crawls her way around, ready to pounce at any moment. Grace’s animalistic impulses, portrayed by a transcendent Jennifer Lawrence, make for an unpredictable environment. It’s through these small, seemingly insignificant moments of spontaneity that we get the most insight about her interior world. The isolating landscape might be limiting for Grace, but Ramsay uses every inch of it to give Lawrence ample room for psychological exploration. As a result, we get stellar moments like Grace’s boredom sequence (set to the poppy Toni Basil song ‘Mickey’), as well as Grace and Jackson’s feverish wedding party, where she unleashes her truest self.

Even though Grace’s perception of reality might be unreliable, and she might be hallucinating certain moments, Ramsay and Lawrence take the character seriously in a tender embrace. They approach her from an unflinching point of view, unapologetically living inside her brain and letting all the emotions run wild. There’s never any doubt that what she’s feeling is real. Every primal expression is rooted in Grace’s perpetual search for her identity back — whether she’s rolling through the fields with a knife, licking and banging on the windows, scratching her nails against the bathroom wallpaper, or barking back at a pet dog (which Jackson randomly brings home without talking to her first). With an intimate aspect ratio, the film lives and breathes Grace’s impulses, giving us the feeling of discovering newly awakened emotions alongside her. 

Ramsay knows exactly how to set a mood and capture a vivid atmosphere, especially through the use of sound and music. Working with her longtime sound design collaborator Paul Davies, Ramsay pinpoints several places (namely an incessantly barking dog) to heighten the emotions of a scene and signify a page turning in Grace’s mind. When Grace hears a motorcycle revving outside her house, for instance, there’s a moment of escapism in Lawrence’s reaction that ultimately draws her closer to a motorcycle rider named Karl (Lakeith Stanfield). Though, the depiction of their relationship speaks to the rare occasion in this film where Ramsay’s vision loses focus. Karl’s characterization, and the extent to which he’s meant to be a figment of Grace’s imagination, becomes too much of an enigma.

Ramsay’s balance between realism and imagination shines best in the depiction of Grace’s fragmented, free flowing self. Jennifer Lawrence unlocks a fascinating character study with this character and delivers career-best work. She keeps us on the edge of our seats, and lives in compelling spontaneity. The role plays to Lawrence’s strengths in many ways — she’s funny, goofy, instinctive, and a truly natural performer. Lawrence also gets the opportunity to take an enormous creative swing, by immersing herself into the deep end of primal impulses and self-destructive tendencies. She embraces the nonlinear, unfiltered structure and takes this role beyond definitions of a postpartum experience. It’s through her raw and real portrayal that we can gather so much more, whether it’s the major creative block she’s facing or the pressures to exemplify a “good wife.” Die My Love also plays in the vein of Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! when it comes to Lawrence’s risk taking. She’s explored the indie world with Lila Neugebauer’s Causeway, the raunchy comedy with Gene Stupnitsky’s No Hard Feelings, and following up with Die My Love gives us an adrenaline rush of anticipation for what’s to come in her career. Lawrence continues to show why she’s one of the most invigorating and intuitive talents. 

The way Lawrence has defied expectations and transcended beyond her most widely known roles, namely The Hunger Games franchise and her Oscar-winning turn in Silver Linings Playbook, is very reminiscent of her Die My Love co-star Robert Pattinson’s acting journey. Since exploding onto the scene with the Twilight films, Pattinson has found an individualistic path onto becoming the actor he is today. In the span of ten years, he’s starred in films by David Cronenberg, Josh & Benny Safdie, Claire Denis, Robert Eggers, Christopher Nolan, Hayao Miyazaki, and Bong Joon Ho. Plus, he gave us a great new Batman. In Die My Love, Pattinson delivers some of his most alive and electric work. He both matches and pulls away from Lawrence’s energy, in equal measure, speaking to a transformative love story at the film’s core. Jackson and Grace are experiencing intense shifts in their relationship, and he’s bewildered at not being able to recognize her. He’s more concerned with fitting into societal moulds and satisfying his own needs than he is with attempting to understand Grace’s perspective. And yet, Pattinson doesn’t let us forget that there’s still love in their relationship, expressed most freely in the quieter moments between them.

So much of this film depicts Grace’s search for identity in a distorted reflection, where she no longer recognizes herself outside of being a mother and a wife. From the outside looking in, her mother-in-law Pam (Sissy Spacek) seems to be the only person who truly acknowledges and recognizes what’s going on. When Grace and the baby make a surprise visit to Pam’s house one day, we get a stunning conversational moment of generational resilience and survival. Pam reassures Grace that after having a baby, “everybody goes a little loopy the first year, but [she’ll] come back.” Pam identifies with the primal void and truly sees Grace, which adds incredible warmth to all of their scenes together. It’s no surprise that Sissy Spacek, personally on my Mount Rushmore of greatest actors, is absolutely phenomenal here. What strikes a radical chord is how Pam transcends what could have been a two-dimensional role, and becomes a powerful generational voice in the film. She’s a woman who has come out the other side and can impart words of wisdom. And she’s a woman who sleepwalks with a shotgun, cackling across the rural nighttime roads. 

There’s a grounding energy to Grace and Pam’s scenes that speaks to how well Ramsay keeps Die My Love firmly planted in human nature, even when visually it feels otherworldly at times. When Grace takes the baby and disappears into a forest for hours, while the song ‘Little April Shower’ from Disney’s Bambi plays, Ramsay evokes a dark fairytale. The forest seems so far away, like another dimension where she could escape. The thematic resonance of this setting would become crucial to the film’s ending, which leaves us on a question mark of where Grace has gone, exactly. Is she setting fire to her life to start anew? Perhaps a fiery flicker will light a path pack towards the parts of her that she lost after having a baby? Is she embracing the raging fire within, and never going back? Whatever the case may be, ultimately Die My Love resonates as an unapologetic love story where our relationships to ourselves, and to others, can change so radically over time.