mother!

DIE MY LOVE

2025

Directed by Lynne Ramsay

Written by Enda Walsh, Alice Birch, and Lynne Ramsay (based on the novel Die, My Love by Ariana Harwicz) 

Spoilers: moderate

Lynne Ramsay has never been prolific—for her career has been a little cursed, with some of her bad luck, perhaps, being of her own making—but eight years between features is a long time no matter how you slice it, which is how long it's been since Ramsay's last film, You Were Never Really Here back in 2017.  And nevertheless her new film, Die My Love, feels like Ramsay's picking up somewhere pretty damned close to where she left off, though I think I might have a hard time describing exactly how I perceive that to be: Die My Love, adapting Ariana Harwicz's apparently very successful novel, doesn't much track with Never Really Here's specific subject matter (that one was about a good-guy hired thug and this is about a new mother, so practically the opposite), or with the more obvious aspects of its aesthetics (which are somehow even more the opposite, Never Really Here being very concerned with urban nights and Die My Love being extremely set in rural Montana), or maybe even the less obvious aspects of its aesthetics.  Maybe it's that You Were Never Really Here would be an even more appropriate name for this film than it was for that one (and a more appropriate name than the one it has).  In both cases, the movies are reductively "about" their protagonists' depression; more poetically, they're about watching while each one of them vanishes out of creation, more as a matter of deliberate intention (and also more as a metaphor) in Never Really Here, and more as a matter of passivity in the face of an organic disease, which its heroine essentially fails to make much of any effort to resist because it's not worth the bother, here in Die My Love.  And also in both cases, there's going to be the persistent sense that they're narrative experiments or, really, just plain formal exercises, but interesting ones, which is where I've generally been with Ramsay; she makes "movies that I find fascinating," not so much "movies that I love."  But I'll give Die My Love this much, by the end I'm pretty sure I loved it a little bit.

Anyway, for movies made eight years (and at least two other abortive projects for Ramsay) apart, this one and Never Really Here make uncommonly good companion pieces.  So what we have is a fun-loving couple, Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson), whom we meet as they occupy a house back in Jackson's rural hometown in Montana, formerly belonging to his uncle and inherited by him, and relatively close to Jackson's mother Pam (Sissy Spacek) and father Harry (Nick Nolte), sort of a white trash Gone Girl kind of thing, though Grace is said to be a writer and can, theoretically, write anywhere, including out here, though I'm not sure what if any evidence is ever provided that she is a such a creature as "a writer" in a professional sense, and in practice she can't write out here.  Instead, she gets knocked up, and Jackson works some kind of job that finds him away from home for somewhat sustained periods (my personal theory is he's a truck driver, but whatever his job is—it's obviously not a priority of the movie to give a shit—it sure must be fantastically well-compensated considering the expenses he winds up having and that it is, explicitly, part-time).  She has her baby, a boy, and things only get worse from there, Grace suffering, acting out, and decoupling from reality all in equal measure.

It's not even slightly a movie about its plot; if you've seen the movie already, I strongly recommend visiting its Wikipedia page and skimming its detailed "plot" section and having a hearty laugh at how some poor, pathologically literalistic Wiki-editor decided to yoke a detailed description of the movie's scenes into something resembling an actual narrative, as if most of this movie actually "happened" when it fairly obviously does not, at least in much of any way as it's depicted.  What it is, then, is in some respects tough to relay.  I mean, I could make it very easy on myself, and say "it's a movie about postpartum depression and the absence of support for women who suffer it, delivered as a series of vignettes regarding Grace's breakdown that more-or-less progress chronologically but also have more of an interest in describing her subjective psychological states."  It's not not that, except it kind of fundamentally isn't that—even as a matter of form, the movie doesn't "ramp up to" that breakdown, she's on the edge of something basically as soon as it starts, and the imagery has a certain abstraction by, like, minute five, notably a sex scene that's organized around time-collapsing and clothes-removing match cuts that would work out pretty well for pornography if it weren't obviously too difficult—and it's even to some degree expressly not that, with a scene at a party that Grace has been dragged out to and which, by no means, she should actually be attending (no responsible family member would've allowed her to come, let alone asked her to), where some phantom woman flitting into the scene remarks that she knows all about postpartum depression and it's such a shame that no one ever talks about it, and Grace glares back to flatly reply something along the lines of "It's all anyone ever talks about."  And I did laugh at the line, being a fairly good six-word summation of exhaustion with discourses on virtually every problem "no one ever talks about" that somehow still never gets solved.

So it's more like just one factor, as is Jackson's general shittiness—one of the first things he does after the birth of their child is buy a dog, without telling Grace, like that would be okay even in other circumstances—though it's also pretty noticeable that depending on what's happening he can be close to as devoted and supportive a partner as humanly possible in the midst of that breakdown, and gets substantially better as a husband over the course of the film which does absolutely nothing to arrest Grace's spiral into oblivion.  And if I mentioned I laughed at that one line, I should clarify that I laughed all over, because (and you can just get this from Ramsay herself) probably the abiding mode of this movie is "comedy."  Getting down to unpoetic brass tacks, the movie is predominantly a series of quick sequences that occasionally flow directly into the next one, though don't make any assumption that they must, that find Jennifer Lawrence doing something ridiculous and childish and, sometimes, nearly inexplicable: for instance, an entire romp through the woods with her babe set to "Little April Shower" from Bambi, and the really weird part, besides somehow acquiring the rights to a Disney song for this thing (though if you think on it, it doesn't quite fail to make thematic sense), is that it's not raining; likewise, I would only be using a little hyperbole if I accused Ramsay of making this movie solely to trick Lawrence into crawling around on all fours like a sexy dog, even though to the best of my knowledge Ramsay's straight (and sure, if I wanted could make a strained interpretation of what we're doing with this atavistic imagery, though the movie may work better without interpretation and its weirdness left to "she is, after all, weird").  Frequently, however, these ridiculous and childish and inexplicable things are also dangerous and horrifying or, at a minimum, really worrisome; several times, they amount to honest-to-God jump scares.

If it's a comedy (and it is, and a funny one), then it's this loopy, dizzying mix of "bitches be crazy*" shock comedy that is, also, a "people, who inevitably are going to experience such struggles through gendered channels, may find their life and their very connection with reality unraveled by mental illness" act of psychohorror.  It's funny, but it works very heavily on the nerves, and would have some trouble supporting two hours (Die My Love reaches right up to the line at 119 minutes), or even adding up to much, if Ramsay and her co-screenwriters weren't being pretty intelligent about how they're constructing it.  I've suggested there isn't much ability for the movie to escalate after its first little while, and that's somewhat the case, at least not in an overt "and then she does this, even worse incomprehensible, unconscionable thing" kind of way.

One way it manages this is that at least a good half the incomprehensible, unconscionable things she does, she to a certainty didn't—LaKeith Stanfield is in this movie, as a sort of motorcycle-mounted locus of Grace's unfulfilled eroticism; the actual "character" he plays can't be in more than the barest handful of shots, and I frankly cannot say if he does, in fact, own any motorcycle—which tends to call into question what fraction of the other half might be in her head, too, though presumably a big chunk of it isn't.  (The "affair" with Stanfield's biker probably doesn't have any more existence outside of Grace's head than what prompted it, Jackson's purported "affairs" with diner waitresses.)  But it's even more a matter of storytelling (or mood-creating) strategy: now, this is a very rough approximation, but the first half of the movie is, if not always "real," presenting its collection of actual events, fantasy, and hallucination in something like linear time and with some barely-perceptible boundary between them, and then, without marking this progression at all, allowing chronology to become exceedingly soft.  This isn't solely as a matter of cutting, or even mostly as a matter of cutting, but the "plot" events of the second half are so strange and counter-intuitive that I think it's actually easier to understand them as past and present sloshing together inside a brain that isn't able to entirely tell the difference between those things anymore.  Maybe it's more literally denotative than I'd prefer to assume that Grace and Jackson get married much closer to the end of the movie than the beginning, and it's not entirely implausible that this might be the case (unwise, sure, but not implausible), but Die My Love has at least primed you to suspect its vignettes—rather, its momentary impressions of madness on the way towards its end—are Grace's memories and imaginings all colliding with each other and getting entangled, to create a visual collage of "how Grace thinks" (an audiovisual collage, really, for there's a lot of manipulation of, and significance to, the sound design here; the phone-fuzz on Jackson's dialogue in a shot of Pattinson is, for example, why I'm confident Jackson's diner waitress seductions are fictitious).  Or, more to the point, "how Grace suffers."  It is at least as much that as any real and accurate record of events.  Meanwhile, though I don't think the movie insists Grace is "worse" at nighttime, Ramsay and cinematographer Seamus Garvey have sure struck on a way to make nighttime feel uncanny as hell, this preposterously deeply blue-filtered day-for-night that is, bizarrely, sometimes darker and more obscure than the "horror movie actual dark" we've been getting for the last few years—I wouldn't even eagerly agree I "enjoyed" this conceit, outside of the wonky images of Pattinson as a pensive Marlboro Man, but it's distinctive.**

This all provides a certain mutually-reinforcing support for a movie that we could, if we wanted, break into another set of analytical halves: the first part that's, frankly, mostly wacky bullshit, or at least horrific stuff mostly presented in a wacky bullshit tenor (a fairly early image, real or not, concerns Grace stalking husband and child with a knife; the story of a suicide culminates with the revelation he shot himself in the ass), and increasingly-less-wacky, even serious shit, at least when it comes to the tone, as the substance of Grace's decline becomes more unbearable and heads in darker, more inevitable directions.  And this may be as much a way of praising Lawrence, who is going for broke with movie-movie crazy, but always in a way that seems to understand how the broken machinery in Grace's head works, and with little expressions that can capture the moment that Grace has decided on a course of [action x] which, to you or I, only seems bonkers, but, to her, really is more like an attempt to fix what she thinks is wrong (and, as things progress, is more like a desperate bid to feel and experience anything that will shock her back into a true "present" state of being); and in that shifting pattern, and the accumulation of these moments, the movie's initial willingness to agree, perhaps with Grace herself, that this is funny rather than terrifying tends to let the misery of it all sneak up on you in a way pure miserablism likely could not.  There's not, I don't think, a grand statement here about mental illness, or gender, or rural anomie, or whatever, but a lot of little statements, and one matter-of-fact statement that's presented so plainly that it's not grand, even if it encompasses the whole world, for while Grace's day's come a lot earlier, both of Jackson's elderly parents' are losing their minds, too, which is maybe even why they bring out the kinder, gentler side that Grace still has some access to—and so the point, if there is one, is that every brain fails in the end, and, often as not, it's messy.  (Or if it there is an actual grand statement, then it's that the form Ramsay's given this tale—a collection of jagged-edged, shameful memories that either mars everything happy and healthy about Grace's life, or exiles it entirely, and in neither case any longer recoverable—turns her movie into Grace's own argument for the correctness of her final decision, the one that's effectively already spoiled by the title if not the opening images, which turns out to be not only death but the eradication of whatever fraction of a book that she'd completed, which I suppose is as much to say, what's left of her mind whether the suicide is literal or not.)  The way it pursues all this is probably not to all tastes, and could just reasonably be held as little more than a surreal romp.  But I don't know, I dug it a lot; as a very particularized attempt to understand the implacable enemy to which its heroine has in all the essentials surrendered, before the movie's even started, I think Ramsay's made something pretty great here.

Score: 8/10

*Told you I could make a strained interpretation of the puppy play.  It might not even be that strained, I have no idea; there is, undeniably, a certain parallel that Grace-the-character would like us to make between her and what becomes of the actual dog.

**It's also in Academy ratio because... uh, 'cause.