Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love begins on a deceptively sedate note. A young couple move into the rural home inherited from the boyfriend’s uncle. Over a lengthy uninterrupted take, Grace and Jackson get a feel of the house they will inhabit for the foreseeable future.
I can practise drumming, Jackson (Robert Pattinson) tells Grace (Jennifer Lawrence). You can finish your novel, he adds. A montage of hectic lovemaking follows, set to a thrashing background score. Grace becomes pregnant. The couple bop around like kids.
The euphoria snaps, as it often tends to. The movie slows down and grinds away. Something has been gnawing at Grace, and it engulfs her. Post-partum depression wrecks her relationship, her literary ambitions, and her sense of self.
Ramsay’s adaptation of Ariana Harwicz’s 2017 novel Die, My Love is an unsparing account of a relationship in spectacular freefall. Written by Ramsay, Enda Walsh and Alice Birch, the movie revolves around a complicated woman running around with knives, hurting nearly everyone around her but mostly herself.
Jackson is unable to fathom, let alone handle, Grace’s erratic behaviour and increasingly tenuous grip over reality. His mother Pam (Sissy Spacek) can’t offer Grace any more support than the platitude that all women become “loopy” in the first year after birth. Pam has her personal demons too, as Grace finds out.
The 2025 production is out on MUBI. Die My Love is a sensory experience rather than a psychological portrait. Instead of seeking the roots of Grace’s fragile mental state, the film wallows in her here-and-now, her frustrated sex life, her wandering eye, the communication gap that is widening with Jackson.
The febrile camerawork and discontinuous editing are accompanied by a pounding soundtrack, which includes a version of Joy Division’s scorching Love Will Tear Us Apart. The highly stylised 118-minute film is almost unbearably intense at times, and not always in an organic way.
Some of the scenes between Grace and Jackson have the feel of acting masterclasses. Although Ramsay’s flourishes are overdone to the point of being laboured, her chronicle of womanhood in despair is hard to look away from.
The leads are in perfect sync, even as their characters spin out of control. Robert Pattinson ably complements the film’s main draw: Jennifer Lawrence, raw, fearless and uninhibited like never before. While there are cameos for Nick Nolte and LaKeith Stanfield, Lawrence dominates the train wreck that unfolds in often discomfiting slow motion.
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