Lynne Ramsay hasn’t received much play in North Texas. Of course, she’s only directed five feature films since her debut film Ratcatcher in 1999. Morvern Callar only played at the Modern Art Museum in 2002, We Need to Talk About Kevin saw light of day at the Fort Worth Film Festival, and You Were Never Really Here played for one week at the AMC Grapevine Mills in 2018.
So it’s significant that her latest film Die My Love is opening on a bunch of screens in Tarrant County this weekend. That’s likely down to its splashy premiere at the Cannes Film Festival this past summer. If you’ve heard anything about the movie, you likely heard that Jennifer Lawrence gets naked and loses her grip in a major way in this movie, both of which are true. However, you should also see it because the Scottish director’s films aren’t like other people’s.
Lawrence portrays Grace, an aspiring novelist and new mother who is creatively blocked and suffering from postpartum depression that’s shading over into postpartum psychosis. Her husband Jackson (Robert Pattinson) has moved the family into his uncle’s house in the country after his uncle committed suicide there in a particularly gruesome way. Jackson’s mysterious job takes him out of town for four days each week, leaving Grace alone to parent the baby boy, whom the couple hasn’t named yet.
Thinking she needs companionship, Jackson gets a dog without consulting her, which backfires disastrously when the dog exacerbates her insomnia by barking all night. She points a rifle at a sleeping Jackson before waking him and telling him to use it to kill the dog, and when he refuses, she takes both dog and gun outside and goes all Kristi Noem. The next morning, as Jackson is burying the animal, she hurls herself through a glass sliding door and puts herself in a hospital.
And even after that, he still insists that she just needs some space. Based on a Spanish-language novel by Ariana Harwicz (which I admit I haven’t read), the film is of a piece with Darren Aronofsky’s mother!, which also had Lawrence as a mother whose mind is disintegrating in a remote house that leaves her with no place to go. Much like Ramsay’s previous two films adapted from novels, this one appears to have removed too much of the source material. Non-readers of the book may wonder who LaKeith Stanfield is playing here, or why we’re getting shots of Grace’s mother-in-law (Sissy Spacek) sleepwalking with a rifle around the countryside. If Amy Koppelman’s recent A Mouthful of Air is shallower, it’s also a more powerful portrait (with a better lead performance) of a mother who’s losing her battle with depression.
Which isn’t to say that Lawrence is bad here. Grace’s antics may come off as rather Oscar bait-y, but Lawrence is in it whether she’s staring kohl-eyed through her window or barking back at a dog that she clearly hates from the first day. She does some of her best work late in the film, after Jackson does what he should have done much earlier and deposits Grace at a mental hospital. In a therapy session, she looks like she’s staring into the abyss as she reveals to the psychiatrist (Tom Carey) that she’s dealing with some heavy issues that go back well before the baby was born.
The movie’s squarish frame and Seamus McGarvey’s numinous cinematography give this the appearance of a fable. Maybe too much so in the visions of the forest around Grace’s house being instantly engulfed in flames, but it seems to mimic the protagonist’s zoned-out frame of mind where she’s dislocated from everything around her, even while she’s trying to be the best mother she can be. While there are better movies than Die My Love about its subject, Ramsay’s and Lawrence’s particular blend of mess and control makes hers something to be seen.
Die My Love
Starring Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson. Directed by Lynne Ramsay. Written by Enda Walsh, Lynne Ramsay, and Alice Birch, based on Ariana Harwicz’ novel. Rated R.
