Editor’s Notice: This assessment was initially revealed throughout the 2025 Cannes Movie Competition. MUBI releases “Die My Love” in theaters Friday, November 7.
You haven’t lived till you’ve seen Jennifer Lawrence doing any of the debasing issues she does in Lynne Ramsay’s “Die My Love,” like crawling on all fours by a subject of grass, a kitchen knife in hand as she closes in on her character Grace’s new child child, or masturbating gloomily in a state of postpartum doom whereas her husband Jackson (Robert Pattinson) finishes cooking dinner downstairs, a self-induced orgasm timed to the spring of a toaster under.
Grace is simply making an attempt to be a very good spouse, a very good mom, however she’s failing spectacularly at it in Ramsay’s alternately absorbing, exhausting tone poem of post-birth grief became psychosexual frenzy. Lawrence — whose fearless ability in conjuring ladies gone perilously over the verge and unhinged from high to toe whereas making an attempt to play home was already established in Darren Aronofsky’s “mom!” — offers the type of unleashed efficiency movie competition Finest Actress prizes are made for within the “We Have to Speak About Kevin” filmmaker’s newest.
Co-written with Enda Walsh and Alice Birch from a novel by Ariana Harwicz, “Die My Love” is a two-hour cinematic miasma of what it’s prefer to be in postpartum melancholy hell and possessed by a sexual urge for food that might by no means presumably be quenched by even somebody as scorching as Robert Pattinson. As such, it is going to be a tricky promote for even Lawrence’s most ardent followers. The story gives little to hook us onto apart from Grace’s fixed flailing by psychosis, visually realized by cinematographer Seamus McGarvey with the sensation of a foul dream you get up from in a heated, unforgiving sweat. The ambiance of this fugue-state-turned-panic-attack of a movie isn’t not intoxicating. As Grace spins out in a hothouse countryside beset by ever-buzzing flies — inescapable swelter and tall grass abound — you possibly can all however really feel the ticks and Lyme illness consuming you.
These are all testaments to what a visceral, unusually subjective filmmaker Ramsay is. In “We Have to Speak About Kevin,” she straps us into the fracturing thoughts of a mom whose sociopathic son has simply shot up his faculty, turning her neighborhood towards her. “Die My Love” presents us with a really totally different type of mom, one not simply preferred or pleasantly watchable and one much less sympathetic than Tilda Swinton’s in “Kevin.” The often implausible human conduct on show right here feels nearer to “Morvern Callar” in soul and tone. In that Ramsay movie, Samantha Morton stole her useless boyfriend’s manuscripts to pose as the author she might by no means be, leaving his physique to decay into rigor mortis of their residence.
Grace can also be a author, although she’s watched that dream curdle and die (and at her personal discontented devising) together with seemingly her personhood amid the start of a cute child boy and a simultaneous transfer with Jackson into his useless uncle’s neglected-looking nation home. “Die My Love” begins with photographs of a forest hearth (which this grueling, troublesome, however typically stunning movie will return to) that give option to a punk-rock montage of Grace and Jackson fucking furiously, spliced and diced manically by editor Toni Froschhammer. Grace has a nonstop sexual starvation that doesn’t conform comfortably to the calls for of motherhood; calls for the place, for her, nymphomania-adjacent tendencies intrude with child displays and breast-feeding.
Lawrence typically has this frisky, rabid grin that’s irresistible to look at but in addition scary. “An actual mother would have baked a cake,” Grace says, as she serves what’s principally a melted soup of sugar to Jackson and their youngster on what seems to be one among their good days. A lot later, and after occasions I gained’t spoil, she is going to serve up a cake frosted with the phrases “Mommy’s Residence” that crystallize simply how a lot this lady just isn’t essentially the most skillful of bakers. Or homemakers. Or the type of lady who might ever be both of these, one which any man or any life or any world expects her to be.
I don’t suppose there has ever earlier than been such a psychologically immersive view of postpartum melancholy as “Die My Love” onscreen. The movie careens between a dreary sludge of despair and eventual heart-palpitating nightmare, Grace caught in a mercurial storm of her personal moods with out ballast and unable to be understood by these round her. Particularly not Jackson’s mother and father, Pam (Sissy Spacek, whose character’s personal previous background reveals stark parallels to Grace’s present one) and Harry (Nick Nolte, rattled by dementia and in addition plopped into this film pointlessly).
In the meantime, a motorcycle-riding neighbor performed by LaKeith Stanfield encircles the grounds, seeming to supply extra promising methods to fulfill Grace’s sexual rigors now that Jackson can’t appear to match as much as his spouse’s pathological horniness. Whats up, amorous, foreboding stranger, as Grace chases after a thriller man in a helmet she doesn’t know. In film phrases, he seems to be a crimson herring, or not less than not a personality Ramsay and Walsh are excited by constructing out. Then once more, not one of the extracurricular ensemble will get a lot of an opportunity to shine or grow to be actual folks. Apart from Spacek’s Pam, who finally will get a quick second to narrate to Grace’s plight as they toast to the mutual oblivions they’ve created as unfit moms.
“Die My Love” isn’t and not using a sly humorousness, which elevates this movie above different related motion pictures that induce their viewers into as deep an emotional coma as their protagonist. Lawrence delivers some sharply barbing, quotable, I-must-write-this-down one-liners, like when she’s purchasing, in one other of her displaced fogs, at a gasoline station market, and a perky cashier asks her, “Discover every part you have been on the lookout for?”
“In life?” Grace replies, earlier than ripping into this completely good lady. How humorous Grace would’ve been as a personality with out Lawrence on the helm, who is aware of? The “Silver Linings Playbook” actress — who completely straddles the road between perversion and pathos simply by her pure look, right here with bangs and freaked-out eyes — at one level stands over a clean piece of paper, dead-eyed, pondering her former life as a would-have-been author, whereas mixing her personal breastmilk with ink.
Like “We Have to Speak About Kevin,” “Die My Love” is each a warning towards the sudden perils of motherhood and in addition an embrace of their incumbent ills as a essential a part of the job. Ramsay’s filmmaking is undeniably highly effective, engulfing us within the sick stew of Grace’s thoughts whereas flooding the soundtrack with music from Lou Reed, David Bowie, and the Cocteau Twins (Ramsay has all the time been an apt picker of songs that inform the psychic story of her movies’ protagonists). However there’s plenty of time spent on Grace wandering concerning the proverbial emotional cabin — and in addition this literal one she lives in with Jackson.
Blood pours off her face plenty of the time from varied self-inflicted wounds. There’s a motif a couple of horse that’s onerous to make sense of apart from the apparent: freedom lives in all places else besides in this lady’s life. You virtually want Grace would lose it just a bit bit extra within the film’s first hour; you crave the “mom!”-level breakdowns of a lady, lastly, screaming, “Get out of my fucking home!”
Till the later stretches, the place Grace and Jackson lastly obtain an entente that leaves her, the bloodied lady with a child carriage on the street and tears in her eyes, compelled to resist the household she’s placing into destroy. “Die My Love” may be languorous in its imaginative and prescient of an individual coming undone, however Lawrence is recreation and fearless, stripping herself in all senses to lean into a lady’s debilitating emotional disaster.
Her sexual freefall is among the many extra compelling in latest cinematic reminiscence regardless of its purposeful blinders on the subject of different, much less compelling characters. At one level Grace calls Jackson a “ineffective fucking faggot” when he can’t get it up for a compelled second of hasty intercourse within the entrance seat of their automobile. Lawrence is beautiful, however on this state? No, thanks, to this mentally in poor health request for lovemaking. As undeveloped as Pattinson’s Jackson is, you need to hand it to him whereas additionally eager to slap that very hand throughout his face: Get up, dude. However there’s one thing unusually romantic about this pairing, which Ramsay drills dwelling within the closing coda. They want one another, and perhaps all Grace needed to know was affirmation of Jackson’s personal want, too.
Seeing “Die My Love” at Cannes, European critics can be unfazed by Lawrence’s unvarnished and really bare flip, although within the U.S., she can be recommended for her “bravery.” If sufficient folks see it in any respect to make such an appraisal. Her efficiency will shock the baser public. What Lawrence achieves right here is extraordinarily spectacular, a marquee film star throwing herself with abandon right into a filmmaker’s warped and demandingly depressing imaginative and prescient. A final visible metaphor, nonetheless strained, forces us (and Jackson) to lastly see Grace for who she is: a lady past the pale, past reproach, past assist. Lawrence is dedicated to the madness. She’s by no means been higher, and he or she wants no assist attending to the place this movie takes her. Lynne Ramsay, wind her up and watch her go.
Grade: B
“Die My Love” premiered on the 2025 Cannes Movie Competition. MUBI releases it in theaters Friday, November 7
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