DIE MY LOVE: The Feel-Bad Movie of the Year

Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love starts and ends with the image of Jennifer Lawrence walking naked in the burning woods, like Eve wandering through Hell. Like many images in the film, this opening is at once poetic, carnal, and animalistic. At times, the film’s dramatic structure feels like a dark fairytale, but don’t be fooled into thinking that it has a clear message or moral. Those who want easy answers and a straightforward plot should steer clear of Die My Love, a singular exploration of mental illness in women that isn’t afraid to disgust, repulse, or outright lose its audience.

Marriage Story

When writer Grace (Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson) move into their new home, a dirty and isolated two-story house in the woods, Jackson reassures Grace that it’s the perfect place for her to write. They spend most of their time having sex, drinking, and dancing, like they’re Ozark Bohemians. It’s the sort of lifestyle that doesn’t seem sustainable, emotionally or economically. It feels like sooner or later, reality is going to come crashing down on top of them.

Soon, they have a baby. Grace absolutely loves her child, but there are also signs that she’s not completely well. She crawls around their overgrown lawn with a large kitchen knife. She totally stops writing. And most alarmingly, she begins hurting herself, in more ways than you could imagine. She throws herself through a glass door, slams her head into a wall, and claws at the wallpaper until her fingers bleed.

For his part, Jackson mostly doesn’t intervene, either playing dumb about his wife’s obvious ongoing mental health crisis or remaining honestly oblivious to what’s happening. We have no idea what he does for a living, but it’s implied that he’s having sex with other people while his wife is at home spiraling into mania with their son. His one contribution to the household is a poisonous one: He brings home a small dog without even consulting Grace. They never train the dog, and after a few weeks Grace takes a shotgun from her mother in law (Sissy Spacek) and shoots the poor animal in the woods.

A Domestic Drama Shot Like a Horror Film

Seamus McGarvey shoots Die My Love very close to the actors. The short focal length not only throws us headfirst into their dysfunctional world, but it also forces us to imagine the stress that these two must be experiencing. Die My Love’s harsh blue lighting recalls Gore Verbinski’s The Ring, putting you on edge waiting for the next terrible thing to happen.

Ramsay is only happy to oblige, and every scene she shows Grace breaking again and again, in increasingly brutal ways. From the beginning, Grace behaves like a woman possessed, and I was reminded of both Possession — in which Isabelle Adjani’s character similarly begins descending into a sort of madness in a full-body visceral performance — as well as a lesser-known Japanese psychological horror film called Kotoko, which also tries to show you mental illness by locking you into the protagonist’s point of view.

Grace’s mental breakdown recalls such titanic works of empathetic cinema as John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence and Kelly Reichardt’s River of Grass, and the wild frequent sex scenes and “Love Me Tender” needledrop echo David Lynch’s Wild at Heart. But compared to those works, Die My Love comes across stiff as a yoke and short on imagination. It lacks coherency and artistic vision.

On Jennifer Lawrence

Comparing any actress, living or dead, to Gena Rowlands is an insult to the brilliance of Gena Rowlands, so I’ll spare Jennifer Lawrence the comparison, but I found her portrayal of a woman in the midst of a full mental breakdown to be surprisingly vague, a little inconsistent, and overwrought. The role clearly required her to go to some dark places, and Ramsay is more than capable of following her there, but both came up short in Die My Love. Perhaps Ramsay lacked a stern approach to the material — she cut the child resentment from the original novel and transposed its setting from France to generic Middle America, which suggests that she agreed to adapt a work that she did not feel comfortable filming on its own terms. As for her lead actor, Lawrence does not feel like she’s playing a character here — the role is little more than a collection of self-harming tendencies, and her performance is whatever the film needs it to be from one scene to the next. It felt like a showreel for a terrific awards campaign, or a series of bite-sized chunks of mania ready to be consumed on TikTok, but it did not feel like a cogent, fully realized performance.

While I generally don’t take umbrage with actors for being famous — their personal lives should not affect their work, nor should a good critic judge a character by the image of the actor playing them. But the sheer A-List status of Lawrence and Pattinson kept me at arm’s length from the film, robbing me of any verisimilitude it had worked to achieve. They’re simply too famous, too pretty and perfect, to be believable as a few horny, dirty, messy adults who spend most of their time together shouting at the tops of their lungs. In a film like American Hustle for Lawrence or Cosmopolis for Pattinson, the star power works in the actors’ favors, enhancing the performances rather than taking away from them. Here, these performances felt like performances, which might sound ridiculous, but for a film like this, it’s quite a damning critique.

This Movie Isn’t About Post-Partum Depression

Many critics, mostly men, have attempted to explain away the main character’s mental illness in Die My Love as post-partum depression. Likely they all mean well, but I think this reading is mostly incorrect and betrays a misreading of the film or a misunderstanding of post-partum depression. I wouldn’t claim to be an expert on the subject myself, but as someone who runs a feminist book club, the topic enters my day-to-day life with some regularity.

I definitely think that post-partum depression is part of what Grace is suffering from here, and the film even offers it as a solution: “Everyone goes a little loopy the first year,” Sissy Spacek’s character tells Grace. But she doesn’t hate or resent her child — a common symptom of post-partum depression. She doesn’t attempt to harm her child and never questions her ability as a mother. In fact, she’s adamant that her child is perfect and that she loves them. Something much more dark and unknowable is instead happening to Grace, something that cannot easily be handwaved away with a familiar label and a course of treatment.

Die My Love is a film about how the roles and expectations Western society has for women are at best misguided and at worst drive them insane. Grace’s problems stem from her refusal to be so easily pigeonholed into the role of a doting housewife or a brilliant author — she experiences a full-on mental collapse under the pressures of her career and her relationship, not because either of them is particularly taxing, but because she seems to stop believing in the value we assign to them. She’s not repulsed by being a housewife, but she finds no value in it, either. I believe that is what’s happening to Grace here.

Conclusion

I have a gnawing suspicion that Die My Love will be fondly remembered by most cinephiles. It has all the ingredients of a canonized work: an auteur director, a producing credit for Martin Scorsese, two high-profile but still respectable movie stars doing interesting and subversive work, a propensity for avant-garde visual language, and an extremely poor box office showing. As for me, I think the film is monotonous, inscrutable to a frustrating degree, and almost performatively experimental. Ramsay has done better work elsewhere, and, I think, this represents a minor misstep for the filmmaker.

Die My Love is now showing in theaters.