Die My Love opens on an unexpected scene of stillness: a static camera trained on the interior of a rural Montana home, quietly observing the two people maneuvering around inside it: Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and her partner Jackson (Robert Pattinson), who inherited the dilapidated house from his uncle, who committed suicide there. Perhaps that doesn’t sound like the most auspicious of new beginnings (Jackson has to bust a window to get inside), but there’s nonetheless a glint of excitement at their future creative prospects in Grace’s loose, curious movements as she explores the ground floor, Jackson’s voice off-screen eagerly detailing how there’s room for him to make music upstairs, and it’s the perfect environment for Grace to write her great American novel. It isn’t long before they’re frantically making love on the kitchen floor; the next time we see Grace, after the opening title card, she has recently given birth to their son.
New movies by Lynne Ramsay don’t come around too often; Die My Love is the Scottish filmmaker’s first movie since 2017’s You Were Never Really Here (in which Joaquin Phoenix plays a traumatized gun-for-hire who hunts down pedophiles for a living), and only her fifth feature film overall. And yet, her entire filmography— regardless of the content of the story she’s telling— exists at the intersection of very dreamy, and very stressful. Die My Love is no different. There’s something vaguely artificial about the film’s rural trappings— particularly the blue-tinted day-for-night appearance of the exterior night scenes— that could be written off as a by-product of non-Americans (Ramsay reunites with her We Need to Talk About Kevin cinematographer Seamus McGarvey here) translating a Spanish novel (by Ariana Harwicz) set in France to a distinctly America setting. But if that isn’t an intentional choice in crafting an off-kilter environment that matches the protagonist’s increasingly erratic mental state, I’ll pull a Grace and jump out of a moving vehicle.
Die My Love doesn’t make the reason for Grace’s insane behavior— which ranges from jumping into a pool at a children’s birthday party in her underwear to bursting through a glass patio door to threatening to shoot the family dog— entirely clear. It doesn’t need to. The easy analysis is to chalk it up to postpartum depression, a complex subject that’s been mined for stories about psychotic women time and again, but that Die My Love only glances toward. It’s more that the baby, who only occasionally figures into the narrative, is just one ingredient in the stew that drives Grace mad, one that’s oblique enough to invite the viewer to make their own inferences: the isolation of her new environment and the lack of attention from Jackson (who appears to be sleeping around on work trips) twists Die My Love into more a warped romance than an insightful exploration of new motherhood. In fact, Grace appears to actively avoid engaging with the latter fact as much as possible, as evidenced in flashbacks to when she was pregnant and in present-day gatherings when other young mothers and the older friends of Jackson’s widowed mother Pam (Sissy Spacek) broadly acknowledge the hardships that come with becoming a parent.
All of that may cause Die My Love to appear like it is merely portraying a lot of enormous feelings without much to prop them up. But at least Ramsay’s uncompromising intensity demands that her audience feel something. It’s difficult not to— whether that be empathy or irritation or confusion— when Grace spends so much of the film in desperate search of feeling something herself, including beginning a tentative affair with a mysterious man (LaKeith Stanfield) she sees riding his motorcycle around their home— a man who it is later revealed may be searching for a similar escape from a stifling home life through Grace. Lawrence has never been better as she tugs the audience’s sympathies back-and-forth along with Grace’s wild swings, not only because she is so great at delivering a biting bit of dialogue, but because she employs her physicality so effectively. Grace often moves with a feline delicacy, crawling on the floor, or walking carefully, stalking her family like she’s stalking prey. Pattinson— who, like Lawrence, has made similarly bold acting choices following his own stint in a massive YA fantasy franchise— is appropriately more restrained, his frustration and concern painted all across his features. As cutting as they are toward each other, there’s a layer of tenderness running throughout most of their interactions— whether they are singing a duet in the car, or dancing wildly at a party, or rolling happily in the grass— that makes it clear that they do love each other despite everything they’ve been through. But as much as Grace wants Jackson, he’s also standing in her way. Sometimes, we don’t really know what we want, or why we feel the way we feel. If Die My Love has a thesis statement, it’s summed up best by Grace when she tells Jackson they need to kill their perpetually-yapping dog: “Something you love is suffering. Put it out of its misery.”
Die My Love is now playing in theaters. Runtime: 119 minutes. Rated R.
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