“Die My Love” Is Smaller Than Life

Meanwhile, Jackson proves to be something less than a model husband. He brings the dog home without asking; he keeps a box of condoms in the glove compartment, but cannot clearly communicate about them; he unsympathetically expects Grace to run the house while he is at work; he angrily accuses her of embarrassing him in front of his friends. A difficult relationship, as well as other stresses in her life—motherhood, loneliness, unfulfilled desire, creative frustration, and possibly an undiagnosed mental illness—drive her over the edge. She talks to Teddy bear, licks the window, sits in the open refrigerator, spits beer on the floor. She leaves the house in disarray, hoarding dishes and laundry, buying only instant macaroni and cheese. She gratuitously insults a young cashier and causes a scene at the party. She throws herself through a glass door (slashing her face and limbs, requiring hospitalization) and destroys the bathroom to its very foundations. She hits her head on the mirror and ends up in a mental hospital. Why is never clear: she talks to a therapist, who elicits her story of being an orphan as a child and diagnoses her fear of abandonment. But has she been diagnosed with, say, postpartum depression or even psychosis? Are medications prescribed? The film doesn't give any clues.

Instead, Ramsay emphasizes the corporeal fury of Grace's torment. Not only does the film leave out the details of her writing life, her day-to-day activities or inactions, Jackson's work, Grace's relationships outside the home, and the medical specifics of her self-harming activities. In the scene of a party with Jackson's friends, Grace appears with her fingers bandaged – the obvious result of her violent encounter with the bathtub – while there is no immediate aftermath of this frantic destruction, no sight of her and Jackson tending to her wounds more calmly, no sense of what they said to each other afterwards. After Grace throws herself through a glass door – less of a genuine impulse than a sudden shock to the audience – she is next seen in the hospital without Jackson intervening to stop the bleeding, call an ambulance, take her to the hospital himself, watch her being wheeled to the emergency room, talk to the doctor. Ramsay's view of violence is narrow, limited and formulaic, stuck on a banal level of jump scares and wide-eyed horror, without any of the resonant chill of chaotic consequences, the fragile calm of practicality in the face of pain and danger. There is no idea what it means to reflect on what has happened, although the damage done to the body and soul has yet to be assessed and repaired. Striving for intense physicality, Ramsay creates simple sensations.

On the other hand, the mosaic interweaving of the film's time frames is its most pleasant and perfect feature. It may be unclear whether flashbacks such as the couple's raucous wedding party and their heated and rowdy courtship are Grace's memories, or indeed, some scenes (such as with the biker) depict her real affairs or just her fantasies. And yet this free organization of time at least sets the framework for subjectivity, points towards the spiritual world underlying action. Whether this complex structure was created in the script or in the editing room (edited by Tony Froschhammer), it is far more fascinating than the individual elements it juxtaposes.

What's missing from all this suppression of practicality in favor of shock and thrill is imagination. Ramsay drowns her story in singularity and ignores what is dramatic in the ordinary elements of her characters' lives. For that matter, there's no clue when the movie takes place (the cars seem new, but no one does anything with smartphones except make calls) or where (I spotted a car with a Montana license plate). There's never any mention of what might be going on in the wider world or what the characters think about it. There's almost no mention of money: Jackson shows up with a new car, and when Grace wonders if they can afford it, he replies, “Don't worry about it.” (She'd never worried about that before.) In the absence of meaningful conversations or observant curiosity, the film's scenes quickly cut short, lasting just long enough to convey information and just long enough to mark a plot point or character arc.

As an exploration of the postpartum dangers to a woman's mental health, Die, My Love does the subject a disservice by losing sight of the medical specifics, forms and prospects of treatment. The film simultaneously sensationalizes these dangers and subordinates them to a shared socio-existential vision of women's frustrations and enslavement in marriage. For the record, Ramsay said shortly after the film's Cannes premiere in May that “this whole postpartum thing is just nonsense” and added: “It's about the destruction of relationships, the destruction of love and the destruction of sex after having a baby. And it's also about creative stagnation.” The directors are authoritative in their intentions rather than their results, and the film turns out to be much more than she expected, even if it touches too lightly on many of its subjects.

In the absence of meaningfully written characters, actors take their place; Instead of interpreting or embodying the characters in Die, My Love, the actors are forced to model them. Ramsay places the burden of labor on the actors – and particularly on Lawrence, who strains furiously but has so little to do – both in textual content and in uninterrupted screen time to develop scenes beyond their mere informational value. Her performance is deep, but each scene plays like a stand-alone exercise, drifting into abstraction, fueled solely by the force of her will. The result is a tense performance, not because Lawrence lacks immediacy or spontaneity—on the contrary—but because the script and direction give her no opportunity to react. Her creative engine, left untapped, spins wildly, resulting in a spectacle of overexertion that replaces drama.