Directed by Lynne Ramsey | Written by Ramsey, Enda Walsh, and Alice Birch, based the novel by Ariana Harwicz | 119 min | ▲▲
Lynne Ramsey is a shockingly idiosyncratic filmmaker, whose relatively scanty cinematic output means anytime she does release a film it’s an event. The Scottish filmmaker’s previous film, You Were Never Really Here was one of the best of the year it came out, and her Samantha Morton-starring indie Morvern Callar is a chilly classic of British cinema.
Accordingly, I wished I liked Die My Love more. It features a truly raw performance from Jennifer Lawrence that’s probably the best reason to see the film, but it lacks much in the way of narrative coherence. Die My Love delivers a portrait of postpartum depression, loneliness, and boredom, but it isn’t transformative.
Grace (Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson) are a couple who move from the city into his uncle’s abandoned old house somewhere out in the sticks. The plan is she will write a book and he’ll work on his music.
But hold up — if she’s a writer, she doesn’t seem particularly interested in words, in books, or in other writing. He likes music, but we never see him with an instrument in his hand. The movie has its characters siloed from who they say they are, adding to the sense that all of this, the entire film, could be Grace’s delusion. The film offers moments of surreality — like Grace’s fascination and connection with a motorcycle rider (LaKeith Stanfield) — that never seems like it exists outside her head.
The picture is also vague or even obscure in its timeline. Grace has a baby and becomes increasingly unhappy, even unhinged. Jackson is utterly clueless about what she’s feeling or how to help her — though the film refuses to explain why he won’t have sex with her, and she’s incredibly keen to get it on. Her frustration manifests in a series of questionable decisions and behaviours, but somewhere in the second act he proposes. Suddenly family is arranged and a wedding is staged, but more than once I wondered if this was a flashback or, as suggested, all in Grace’s imagination as she slips further into psychosis.
I found myself drawn to scenes with Jackson’s parents, because in those roles Sissy Spacek and Nick Nolte — a Heart Beat (1980) and Affliction (1997) reunion — convey warmth, something largely absent in the central relationship. And this may seem like a nitpick, but for a film that registers deeply in a location — the house Grace and Jackson live in at times feels almost haunted — we get a lot of scenes in the couple’s car that look like what they are, shot on a soundstage but done on the cheap, the “poor man’s process” drawing attention to the artificiality of the scene instead of helping root us in the environment.
At no time are we ever in doubt about Grace’s emotional keel, with Lawrence a raw nerve throughout. She’s simply awesome in this frame, fearless and unpredictable. But the film leaves us with more questions than answers and, a movie like this, won’t provide anything but ambiguity in its endgame. Grace suffers until she chooses a way to end the suffering, but we’re denied meaning in any of it.
