You haven’t lived until you’ve seen Jennifer Lawrence doing any of the debasing things she does in Lynne Ramsay’s “Die My Love,” like crawling on all fours through a field of grass, a kitchen knife in hand as she closes in on her character Grace’s newborn baby, or masturbating gloomily in a state of postpartum doom while her husband Jackson (Robert Pattinson) finishes cooking dinner downstairs, a self-induced orgasm timed to the spring of a toaster below.
Grace is just trying to be a good wife, a good mother, but she’s failing spectacularly at it in Ramsay’s alternately absorbing, exhausting tone poem of post-birth grief turned into psychosexual frenzy. Lawrence — whose fearless skill in conjuring women gone perilously over the verge and unhinged from top to toe while trying to play house was already established in Darren Aronofsky’s “mother!” — gives the kind of unleashed performance film festival Best Actress prizes are made for in the “We Need to Talk About Kevin” filmmaker’s latest.
Co-written with Enda Walsh from a novel by Ariana Harwicz, “Die My Love” is a two-hour cinematic miasma of what it’s like to be in postpartum depression hell and possessed by a sexual appetite that could never possibly be quenched by even someone as hot as Robert Pattinson. As such, it will be a tough sell for even Lawrence’s most ardent fans. The story offers little to hook us onto other than Grace’s constant flailing through psychosis, visually realized by cinematographer Seamus McGarvey with the feeling of a bad dream you wake up from in a heated, unforgiving sweat. The atmosphere of this fugue-state-turned-panic-attack of a film is never not intoxicating. As Grace spins out in a hothouse countryside beset by ever-buzzing flies — inescapable swelter and tall grass abound — you can all but feel the ticks and Lyme disease consuming you.
These are all testaments to what a visceral, unusually subjective filmmaker Ramsay is. In “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” she straps us into the fracturing mind of a mother whose sociopathic son has just shot up his school, turning her community against her. “Die My Love” presents us with a very different kind of mother, one not easily liked or pleasantly watchable and one less sympathetic than Tilda Swinton’s in “Kevin.” The occasionally implausible human behavior on display here feels closer to “Morvern Callar” in soul and tone. In that Ramsay film, Samantha Morton stole her dead boyfriend’s manuscripts to pose as the writer she could never be, leaving his body to decay into rigor mortis in their apartment.
Grace is also a writer, though she’s watched that dream curdle and die (and at her own discontented devising) along with seemingly her personhood amid the birth of a cute baby boy and a simultaneous move with Jackson into his dead uncle’s neglected-looking country house. “Die My Love” begins with images of a forest fire (which this grueling, difficult, but often beautiful film will return to) that give way to a punk-rock montage of Grace and Jackson fucking furiously, spliced and diced manically by editor Toni Froschhammer. Grace has a nonstop sexual hunger that does not conform comfortably to the demands of motherhood; demands where, for her, nymphomania-adjacent tendencies interfere with baby monitors and breast-feeding.
Lawrence often has this frisky, rabid grin that’s irresistible to watch but also scary. “A real mom would have baked a cake,” Grace says, as she serves what is basically a melted soup of sugar to Jackson and their child on what appears to be one of their good days. Much later, and after events I won’t spoil, she will serve up a cake frosted with the words “Mommy’s Home” that crystallize just how much this woman is not the most skillful of bakers. Or homemakers. Or the kind of woman who could ever be either of those, one that any man or any life or any world expects her to be.
I don’t think there has ever before been such a psychologically immersive view of postpartum depression as “Die My Love” onscreen. The film careens between a dreary sludge of despair and eventual heart-palpitating nightmare, Grace caught in a mercurial storm of her own moods without ballast and unable to be understood by those around her. Especially not Jackson’s parents, Pam (Sissy Spacek, whose character’s own past background reveals stark parallels to Grace’s current one) and Harry (Nick Nolte, rattled by dementia and also plopped into this movie pointlessly).
Meanwhile, a motorcycle-riding neighbor played by LaKeith Stanfield encircles the grounds, seeming to offer more promising ways to meet Grace’s sexual rigors now that Jackson can’t seem to match up to his wife’s pathological horniness. Hello, amorous, foreboding stranger, as Grace chases after a mystery man in a helmet she doesn’t know. In movie terms, he turns out to be a red herring, or at least not a character Ramsay and Walsh are interested in building out. Then again, none of the extracurricular ensemble gets much of a chance to shine or become real people. Other than Spacek’s Pam, who eventually gets a brief moment to relate to Grace’s plight as they toast to the mutual oblivions they’ve created as unfit mothers.
“Die My Love” isn’t without a sly sense of humor, which elevates this film above other similar movies that induce their audience into as deep an emotional coma as their protagonist. Lawrence delivers some sharply barbing, quotable, I-must-write-this-down one-liners, like when she’s shopping, in another of her displaced fogs, at a gas station market, and a perky cashier asks her, “Find everything you were looking for?”
“In life?” Grace replies, before ripping into this perfectly nice woman. How funny Grace would’ve been as a character without Lawrence at the helm, who knows? The “Silver Linings Playbook” actress — who perfectly straddles the line between perversion and pathos just by her natural appearance, here with bangs and freaked-out eyes — at one point stands over a blank piece of paper, dead-eyed, pondering her former life as a would-have-been writer, while mixing her own breastmilk with ink.
Like “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” “Die My Love” is both a caution against the unexpected perils of motherhood and also an embrace of their incumbent ills as a necessary part of the job. Ramsay’s filmmaking is undeniably powerful, engulfing us in the sick stew of Grace’s mind while flooding the soundtrack with music from Lou Reed, David Bowie, and the Cocteau Twins (Ramsay has always been an apt picker of songs that tell the psychic story of her films’ protagonists). But there’s a lot of time spent on Grace wandering about the proverbial emotional cabin — and also this literal one she lives in with Jackson.
Blood pours off her face a lot of the time from various self-inflicted wounds. There’s a motif about a horse that’s hard to make sense of other than the obvious: freedom lives everywhere else except in this woman’s life. You almost wish Grace would lose it just a little bit more in the movie’s first hour; you crave the “mother!”-level breakdowns of a woman, finally, screaming, “Get out of my fucking house!”
Until the later stretches, where Grace and Jackson finally achieve an entente that leaves her, the bloodied woman with a baby carriage in the street and tears in her eyes, forced to face up to the family she’s putting into ruin. “Die My Love” can be languorous in its vision of a person coming undone, but Lawrence is game and fearless, stripping herself in all senses to lean into a woman’s debilitating emotional crisis.
Her sexual freefall is among the more compelling in recent cinematic memory despite its purposeful blinders with regards to other, less compelling characters. At one point Grace calls Jackson a “useless fucking faggot” when he can’t get it up for a forced moment of hasty sex in the front seat of their car. Lawrence is gorgeous, but in this state? No, thank you, to this mentally ill request for lovemaking. As undeveloped as Pattinson’s Jackson is, you want to hand it to him while also wanting to slap that very hand across his face: Wake up, dude. But there’s something strangely romantic about this pairing, which Ramsay drills home in the final coda. They need each other, and maybe all Grace had to know was confirmation of Jackson’s own need, too.
Seeing “Die My Love” at Cannes, European critics will be unfazed by Lawrence’s unvarnished and very naked turn, though in the U.S., she will be commended for her “bravery.” If enough people see it at all to make such an appraisal. Her performance will shock the baser public. What Lawrence achieves here is extremely impressive, a marquee movie star throwing herself with abandon into a filmmaker’s warped and demandingly miserable vision. A last visual metaphor, however strained, forces us (and Jackson) to finally see Grace for who she is: a woman beyond the pale, beyond reproach, beyond help. Lawrence is committed to the insanity. She’s never been better, and she needs no help getting to where this film takes her. Lynne Ramsay, wind her up and watch her go.
Grade: B
“Die My Love” premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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