Lynne Ramsay's postpartum phantasmagoria doesn't so much go somewhere as run straight off a cliff, and it's Lawrence who holds the pieces together.
Photo: Cannes Film Festival
This review was originally published on May 24, 2025 by Die my loveThe premiere took place at the Cannes Film Festival. It opened in theaters on November 7.
Die my love got me thinking about that period of time in the 2010s when Jennifer Lawrence made the leap from playing a teenager to playing a wife in a year. In 2012, she starred as 16-year-old Katniss Everdeen in the first film. The Hunger Gamesthen as the widowed Bradley Cooper's love interest to David O. Russell. silver Linings Playbook six months later. Russell cast her as Christian Bale's unhappy wife in American Hustle the following year, when the Long Island matriarch turned QVC queen Joy Mangano into Joy in 2015. It was as if movie stars had become such a scarce commodity that Russell had no choice but to conscript Lawrence, who was undoubtedly one of those anointed few, even if she didn't quite make sense in the roles he cast her in. And she was good in those films, but it was impossible to shake off the realization that Lawrence was playing women who had lived much more of life than she had yet had the chance to.
Lawrence took a short break from screen work a few years ago, and there has been an obvious intentionality in the roles she has taken since then, including two in films she has produced herself. But no recent role has felt more like a declaration of the type of actress she wants to be than the one she's playing. Die my love Lynne Ramsay's new film, which premiered at Cannes, based on the novel by Ariana Harwich. As Grace, a woman who suffers a nervous breakdown after the birth of her first child and a move from the city to the countryside where her husband grew up, Lawrence is overcome by elemental chaos, falling apart in such a way that it seems as if the world is what has gone wrong, not her character. Ramsay is a postpartum phantasmagoria of mundane and fantastical imagery, a film that doesn't so much go somewhere as run straight off a cliff, and it's Lawrence who holds the pieces together. It's a role she's had to grow into – the fact that it was filmed between the births of her two children adds an extra dimension – and she throws herself into it with exhilarating full-body abandon.
Die my love begins with Grace and her husband Jackson (Robert Pattinson) taking over the house that used to belong to his uncle. We are told that she is a writer and he is a musician who takes a job that takes him away from home for long periods of time. Dancing and drinking in between cleaning, they writhe on the floor like fighting animals before stripping off to have sex. These are people who still think of themselves as wild and free, even though the next shot shows Grace pregnant, bouncing to chugging guitars in what now looks like home. Then their child appears, and Grace stalks on all fours through the grass, exuding a fervor that no longer looks playful, especially since she carries a knife. It's a small thing—the baby is six months old—but we can already sense that something is wrong, and the dizzying couple dynamic has given way to something less predictable and no longer in sync. She develops a habit of taking the thousand-yard stare. Jackson can't follow Grace to where she went and doesn't seem to want to understand it. Instead, she begins wandering into the woods after a night feeding, where she encounters a black horse and a helmeted motorcyclist who may or may not be figments of her own increasingly unreliable brain.
This is a production by Lynne Ramsay, Die my love much stranger and stylistically richer than films like Tully And Night bitch which occupy a similar territory. You do get the feeling that Ramsay doesn't always fully understand what she's getting at – this motorcyclist-turned-neighbor, played by LaKeith Stanfield, is part of a subplot so fragmented it's almost impossible to make out. The entire final part of the film defies clear reading, including the wedding, which may be a flashback but which is also directly related to a hospital stay that is clearly set in the present day. But despite all this, Lawrence prowls like a caged tiger, forcing everyone around her to recognize the misfortune that makes her want to retreat from the world and at the same time blow it all up. She exudes such gravitational force that every other role in the film revolves around her energy, with Pattinson, the whiny, ineffectual boy in her orbit, and Sissy Spacek, quietly worried but in decline as Jackson's mother. Die my love skips over the expected moments about the unfair expectations we place on mothers for something more personal for Grace, who is seething with a universal rage whose source she cannot name. Part of it has to do with Jackson, part of it has to do with herself, and part of it has to do with the world that did this to her and dared to reach out in concern after the fact. It's not a film that completely works, but it is a monumental and very adult performance.
