After moving to the countryside to start a family with husband Jackson (Robert Pattinson), Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) suffers from postpartum psychosis.
There’s a feral energy that courses through Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love. It’s there right from the film’s opening moments, when Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson’s young and oh-so-in-love couple Grace and Jackson crawl through tall grass like a pair of lions hunting for a vulnerable gazelle to chew on. In Ramsay’s explosive adaptation of the 2012 novel by Argentine writer Ariana Harwicz, these two characters are hungry. Hungry for love, hungry for sex — and when the couple move to his uncle’s rickety, remote house, they’re hungry for their lives to begin.
They soon have a baby, and the drastic change seems to reduce Grace to the most primal of instincts: feed, change nappies, sleep. She has ambitions to write a novel, he hopes to record an album, but neither of those dreams materialise. Instead, Grace psychologically unravels, and her base self takes over once again. She dances in her underwear, stalks around her home with a knife in hand, and masturbates when there’s nothing else to do. All of that wide-open space that she calls home — which Ramsay captures in the tight, claustrophobic Academy ratio — may as well be a four-walled prison.
Lynne Ramsay reaffirms herself as one of our foremost observers of humanity.
Grace doesn’t fit so easily into the mould of a mother, but Ramsay remains unjudgemental throughout, situating the viewer directly within Grace’s inner torment. The director, along with cinematographer Seamus McGarvey (who previously collaborated with Ramsay on 2011’s We Need To Talk About Kevin), depicts that conflict in a hazy blend of reality and surrealism, intimacy and maximalism.
With just five films over an extraordinary two-decade-long career, Ramsay reaffirms herself as one of our foremost observers of humanity. Her vibrant, immersive portraits of complex people, like Tilda Swinton’s destabilised mother in We Need To Talk About Kevin, have always been deeply immersive, more interested in swimming in the mood and psychology of their characters than they are overly fixated on a linear plot. Die My Love operates in the same way — so much so that it perhaps gets a little lost in its own turbulent dream-state.
Still, it is always incredibly arresting, elevated by Jennifer Lawrence in a no-holds-barred performance that sees her lose all inhibition. The actor takes on a carnal physicality unlike anything she’s embodied before, and it doesn’t feel as if she’s acting so much as allowing the character’s spirit to take hold of her. Pattinson, who’s no stranger to exploring the farthest extremes of himself on screen, is right there with her as Grace’s increasingly distant husband. But this film belongs to Lawrence, devoting every inch of her body to a bold, unrelenting and invigorating study of just how unforgiving motherhood can be.
Lynne Ramsay’s raw and animalistic character study proves to be the perfect vehicle for Jennifer Lawrence. She’s never been better as a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown.