On Monday, I practiced one of my favorite rituals: watching an arthouse film in an empty South Bend movie theater. It’s a very transcendent experience; it’s just you, the faint warmth of a worn-out projector bulb and the weird artistic vision of the filmmaker. And when you walk back to your car while still processing the film’s ideas and moods, you’re met with the harsh whiplash of frigid winds and a barren parking lot filled with black ice. It’s great. The feature film to grace the screen this time was “Die My Love,” the newest film from Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay. Her films are bleak, uncompromising affairs, and this latest one is no different.
“Die My Love” is about a young couple, Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson), who move into a rural house in Montana to start their family, but then become engulfed in turmoil as Grace struggles with postpartum depression. The film wastes no time exploring Grace’s descent into madness and despair. The opening scene shows the couple playfully exploring their new home for the first time, hopeful about this next chapter in their lives. The film then time-skips to a few months after their baby’s birth, and you can immediately tell something is off. Grace is erratic, detached and full of self-loathing. She spends her time crawling through a field of grass with a knife in her hand, approaching her baby as if it were prey; while eating a grocery-store cake with her family, she bitingly remarks that a real mom would have baked one.
Grace is deeply unwell, but the film never gives clean-cut answers about her condition. It assumes the wisdom of “Show, don’t tell,” opting for raw, discomforting depictions of Grace’s postpartum depression instead. This makes its exploration of mental anguish all the more realistic and affecting, capturing how it can swarm a person and defy all rationality. Grace’s despair is gnawing, suffocating and isolating, and the film’s lyrical and enigmatic style complements it hauntingly. The film also holds no bars in showing the depths of her madness; animal cruelty, self-harm, adultery and substance abuse are all stops on her inexorable downward spiral. The film sometimes feels like it’s spinning its wheels with scene after scene of Grace doing something baffling, but it’s still mostly effective.
Lawrence’s unflinching and dangerous performance elevates this character study. She could have easily devolved into bombastic hysterics given the material, but her performance is instead both precise and chaotic. She pairs explosive moments with quiet unease, knowing when to charge and retreat with Grace’s madness. It’s sensational and deserves all the acclaim it is getting. Pattinson also puts in good work as the reactive Jackson. He’s entirely useless in helping her, but his genuine care for Grace makes him more than a one-note idiotic husband character.
The film boldly denies Grace any kind of peace. It has a fake-out beat toward the end where Grace is committed to a psychiatric institution and receives therapy. Her therapist gives her a facile diagnosis of abandonment issues based on one incident from her childhood — if only it were so simple! She is then discharged and admitted right back into the domesticity that was driving her insane, but this time she’s seemingly at peace and baking cake herself now — how wholesome. But at her welcome back party, she snaps after condescending remarks about how much healthier she looks. It’s a brutal moment of regression, illustrating that the demons that haunt her can’t be exorcised with therapy and cake mix. There’s a deeper discordance, an unfixable incompatibility with the domestic, rural life she’s stuck in. She’ll be forever restless; there’s no escape. Following this, the film arrives at its tragic yet liberating ending for Grace.
“Die My Love” is a joyless watch, but a good one. Watching Lawrence unravel with no respite or meaningful help is difficult, but it makes for an important, powerful depiction of an issue many women silently face. If you can find the film in an empty theater in the Midwest that hasn’t been renovated since the ‘90s, I’d highly recommend it.
