Die, My Love is Lynne Ramsay’s intense, often messy psychodrama that casts Jennifer Lawrence as a new mother resisting domestication. Adapted from Ariana Harwicz’s novel, the film privileges a feral, subjective portrait over a clinical account of postpartum depression. Robert Pattinson co-stars, the sound design is deliberately chaotic, and the film’s claustrophobic intensity is both its power and its liability.
Review: Jennifer Lawrence Unleashed in Lynne Ramsay’s 'Die, My Love' — A Raw, Ferocious Psychodrama
Die, My Love is Lynne Ramsay’s intense, often messy psychodrama that casts Jennifer Lawrence as a new mother resisting domestication. Adapted from Ariana Harwicz’s novel, the film privileges a feral, subjective portrait over a clinical account of postpartum depression. Robert Pattinson co-stars, the sound design is deliberately chaotic, and the film’s claustrophobic intensity is both its power and its liability.
02:18, 07.11.2025Culture
Review: Jennifer Lawrence Unleashed in Lynne Ramsay’s Die, My Love
Die, My Love channels a primal, punk-infused energy as Lynne Ramsay pushes a jagged psychodrama to its limits. Jennifer Lawrence stars as Grace, an increasingly unmoored new mother, opposite Robert Pattinson as her husband Jackson. Ramsay’s film — adapted from Ariana Harwicz’s 2012 novel and co-written with Enda Walsh and Alice Birch — is less a clinical study of postpartum depression than a feral, subjective portrait of a woman resisting domestication.
The action unfolds largely in a ramshackle Montana house where real and imagined flames flare and animal imagery accumulates: a yapping dog Jackson brings home after their move from New York, an inconvenient horse in the road and a tiger printed on Grace’s shirt. Early in the film Grace prowls on all fours through tall grass with a knife in hand, a striking image that foregrounds the film’s animalistic impulses.
Grace and Jackson have relocated near Jackson’s childhood home, a house once owned by his uncle before he killed himself. Jackson’s parents, played by Nick Nolte and Sissy Spacek, live nearby; Spacek’s weathered gaze suggests the family carries an older, gothic hurt that frames Grace’s decline. Not long after moving in, Grace and Jackson dance with ferocity and wind up naked on the floor — a sequence that announces the film’s tonal pitch and the actors’ commitment to Ramsay’s extremes.
Pattinson’s Jackson is deliberately muted: a stereotypical foil to Grace in some respects — drinking beer, away at work, more outwardly attentive to the child or the dog — yet Pattinson brings a bemused reserve that complicates a purely oppositional reading. His worried looks register the couple’s drift, but one might argue a more conventional leading man would have sharpened their dynamic. Still, Ramsay appears uninterested in tidy clarity; she keeps the camera and sound tightly lodged in Grace’s perspective.
The sound design (Tim Burns and Paul Davies) is purposefully chaotic: barking, blaring children’s music and domestic noise form a disorienting audio landscape that mirrors Grace’s interior state. LaKeith Stanfield appears briefly in an odd, off-kilter role. Grace herself is a writer who is not writing, and her manic energy occasionally echoes, in tonal terms, Jack Torrance from The Shining — but Ramsay’s aim is subjective experience, not diagnosis.
Ramsay’s uncompromising approach yields strong rewards and notable frustrations. Lawrence delivers a bracingly raw, courageous performance, throwing herself into the role with abandon and generating moments that feel incandescently alive. Yet the film’s relentless intensity can become overamplified: its claustrophobic staging and repeated extremes sometimes feel oppressive rather than emancipatory.
Moments outside the house suggest other tonal possibilities (and allow Lawrence’s quieter comedic instincts to surface), but the film remains overwhelmingly domestic and inward-facing. As Grace insists — "My son is fine. It’s everything else that’s f---ed" — the movie focuses on the cultural pressures that try to reduce her to a tidy maternal archetype, whether in the strained niceties of suburban mothers at a birthday party or the classic-rock soundtrack that grates on her nerves.
Die, My Love is a daring, messy work: audacious in its performances and uncompromising in vision, but occasionally so overdriven that its emotional force tips into suffocation.
Die, My Love is distributed by Mubi. Rated R for sexual content, graphic nudity, language and some violent content. Running time: 118 minutes. Rating: Two and a half stars out of four.