Lynne Ramsay’s feverish, hallucinatory Die My Love opens with a jolt: Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) crawling through the grass, kitchen knife in hand, eyes fixed on her baby across the lawn. It’s a primal image that sets the tone for a film that refuses to sanitize the chaos of motherhood. Later, at a children’s birthday party, Grace and her boyfriend Jackson (Robert Pattinson) mingle with other young parents. But Grace is unmoored—handing her baby to a stranger, drifting away with a glass of wine, her gaze sharp with contempt or detachment. She’s in a trance, alienated from the effortless normalcy around her. When a kind woman offers, “People don’t talk about how hard parenting can be,” Grace snaps back, “That’s all anyone ever talks about.”
The line lands like a slap. Grace is brutally funny. We all know the script on postpartum depression and psychosis—magazines, support groups, pills. But the script only goes so far. Admitting exhaustion or tears gets you a hug. Confessing you want to harm what you love? Silence. Judgment. Mental illness is only “destigmatized” when it’s polite.
This could have been a tidy public-service announcement. Ramsay doesn’t do tidy. Adapted from Ariana Harwicz’s ferocious novel, Die My Love isn’t a case study—it’s a possession. There’s no exposition, no diagnosis, just the raw pulse of Grace’s body and mind. Thought is secondary; impulse rules.
Lawrence has long been called “earthy,” a vague praise that here turns literal. She’s not just in her body—she’s drowning in it, turning to mud. The film begins with a static shot: pre-baby Grace and Jackson wandering his inherited country house, a fixer-upper in the middle of nowhere. No close-ups. Their voices echo through empty rooms—Jackson brimming with plans, Grace listless, already elsewhere. Then they fuck, wild and wordless, a moment of pure connection. The baby comes. The connection dies. Jackson’s job keeps him on the road. Grace is left with the house, the baby, and a yapping dog that never shuts up.
Jackson’s mother Pam (Sissy Spacek) is the only one who notices Grace fraying. Pam herself is unraveling—wandering at night with a rifle, half-asleep, half-lost. Spacek is haunting in these scenes, the line between dream and waking erased. Grace has her own apparition: a motorcyclist (LaKeith Stanfield) roaring past, slowing to stare through his visor. Fantasy or flesh, it doesn’t matter—she’s starving for touch.
Harwicz’s novel is a first-person scream, obsessed with fluids, filth, the erotic charge of decay. Think Moshfegh, Roche, Plath on a bad day. (“If I could lynch my family to be alone with Glenn Gould, I’d do it.”) Screenwriters Enda Walsh and Alice Birch soften the venom, but Ramsay and cinematographer Seamus McGarvey replace it with a visual assault. The countryside isn’t pastoral—it’s a fever. Night scenes glow with a sickly silver; daylight feels wrong. Beauty is absent.
Grace and Jackson both break, but hers is the uglier fracture. She stops washing. She stops pretending. Lawrence channels Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion—not just unhinged but feral, her comic spontaneity now weaponized into something reckless and terrifying. We never leave her head. There’s no relief, no moral, no tidy arc.