Jennifer Lawrence’s Unrepentant Performance Anchors Disorienting ‘Die My Love’

Lynne Ramsay’s “Die My Love” is a perplexing film, led confidently by Jennifer Lawrence, who is in her element as Grace, a new mom spiraling into postpartum depression and perhaps, psychosis, too. Taken as a whole, “Die My Love” is exceedingly strange for almost no reason, unless you think of its unreliability as a reflection of Grace’s brain. Then it makes a little more sense.

Unintended solitary confinement

The storytelling has a suggestion of being linear, with the foundation being set up right from the beginning: a young couple moves from New York to rural, middle-of-nowhere Montana, but very early on, there are signs of instability. We see Grace struggling to adjust to the isolating loneliness of Jackson’s (Robert Pattinson) hometown.

Grace boasts about how much she loves her young baby, but sometimes her actions run incongruous to that. She leaves the baby outside by himself often, sets large knives near his tiny hands, wanders around for hours with him in the dark so long a search party gets sent for them; she might love him in spirit, but those are not behaviors a caring mother typically displays.

Meanwhile, as we all watch in collective dread at Grace’s spiral, Jack is avoidant to the point of comedy. He’s always away working and when he is around, he’s too frustrated by Grace’s perpetual mess to be a good partner to her. His mom, Pam (Sissy Spacek), tries her very best to be there for the both of them, while dealing with her unyielding grief over the loss of her husband, Harry (Nick Nolte).

Lawrence shines in darkness

Although it ultimately shouldn’t matter, this might be the most gorgeous Lawrence has ever looked on film. The way the camera frames her face in the unsettingly artificial blue-lit night scenes sticks to the inside of your brain like cobwebs. It almost feels like half the reason this movie was made was just to look at her and those perfect bangs. 

More importantly, she fills up space as Grace in breathtaking fashion, like an incoming tornado. That very much is what Grace is to this quiet town of normies. She doesn’t laugh when they tell jokes, she strips almost-naked and jumps in pools with children, and her ability to hold a regular conversation slowly disintegrates over the course of the story. She’s also supposed to be a writer, but we don’t see her doing a single bit of writing, aside from some ink splatters mixed with breast milk. A metaphor for how much she appears to have lost when she gained her baby.

You almost want to be as mad at her as Jack always seems to be, but there’s something so sadly relatable about her chaotic spiral and even her tendency to self-harm in the most violent ways. This kind of story likely wouldn’t have been as watchable without Lawrence holding the audience steady. Every other character was pretty underutilized, but the worst of this was the use of LaKeith Stanfield. 

The motorcycle man a.k.a. Karl roars in and out of scenes, almost feeling like a figment of Grace’s imagination, until we come upon him and his family in a parking lot. He’s kind of just there to be Grace’s rebellion, a reflection of her extreme horniness and loneliness. 

By the third act, it seems like this cycle Grace is stuck in feels like it will go on and on forever, until she abruptly puts a stop to it. She knows Jack will always chase her, always come after her, and eventually she says, “Enough.” Instead of crawling, this time she walks with her head held high, losing herself completely.

Final thoughts

I’m stuck between disliking and loving “Die My Love.” It’s a haunting look into how isolating motherhood can be for a new mom, exacerbated with new city loneliness, and a fear of abandonment by people you love. It’s almost suffocating, in a way. Spacek and Nolte really do the best with what little they have, imbuing their characters with a sweet kind of sorrow. However, Lawrence is the real reason to watch. She’s absolutely in her element, and apparently she was pregnant with her second child while filming it.