Jennifer Lawrence Is A Force Of Nature In Die My Love
The Lynne Ramsay psychological thriller is a stunning showcase for the Oscar winner.
You never really know what Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) is thinking. When her husband Jackson (Robert Pattinson) moves them out of New York City into his childhood home in rural Montana, she takes the big change in stride. It’s a bit of a mess, with old pieces of furniture strewn about, and leaves and dust coating the floor, but she’s not opposed to a fixer upper. There’s a bit of a rat problem, but they can get a cat, she suggests. And it’s more isolated than she’s used to, but she’ll finally have the space to write, Jackson says brightly. And as the young couple happily settles into the big, rustic house, we’re treated to a montage of the two of them dancing, cleaning, and fornicating (sometimes all three at once).
But as we see Grace’s belly swell, then go back down as a baby enters their lives, something shifts. Grace and Jackson’s raucous dancing becomes frenzied, desperate, hostile. The newly tidied home turns into an explosion of dirty plates. The cat that Grace wanted never comes, with Jackson instead bringing home a small, barking dog that still needs to be trained. And Grace never really does find the time to write.
Die My Love, the new psychological thriller from You Were Never Really Here and We Need to Talk About Kevin director Lynne Ramsay, never pretends to be a pleasant watch. Based on the 2012 novel of the same name by Ariana Harwicz, it follows a young mother who develops a form of postpartum depression so severe that she begins to take everyone in her life down with her. Like many of Ramsay’s films, it’s a movie designed to keep you on edge rather than to give you real insight into its protagonist’s mind. That, Ramsay seems to say, is up to the audience. And while her trust in the viewer to guess what Grace is thinking is gratifying, sometimes Ramsay’s signature ambiguous filmmaking makes you wish she held the audience at less of an arm’s distance. But thanks to a thunderous central performance by Jennifer Lawrence, who is never more at home than in the role of a woman on the verge of a destructive breakdown, Die My Love is hard to look away from.
Die My Love unfolds a bit like a half-remembered dream, with those frenzied dance sequences between Grace and Jackson punctuating a series of vignettes of their life in the lonely Montana country house. We see flashbacks of Grace gently helping Jackson’s dying father (Nick Nolte) in the throes of dementia, before we get a jarring smash cut to Grace ruefully playing with a steak knife as Jackson’s dog wreaks havoc on their house. Affection sits alongside anger, and resentment, and regret in the chaotic, fraying tapestry that is Grace’s life.
Die My Love is a glimpse into the dark corners that love can take you.
And as the film glides along, we’re treated to surreal interludes that make you question whether they’re real or imagined: a helmeted man on a motorcycle who stalks Grace from afar; a wildfire that swallows up the nearby forest; a woman in a nightgown wielding a rifle and laughing maniacally as she walks through the countryside barefoot. The film eventually reveals that they all have a modicum of truth to them, which makes Grace’s spiral into madness a little more understandable — maybe madness just saturates these strange backcountry lands. "Everybody goes a little loopy the first year,” Grace’s mother-in-law Pam (Sissy Spacek) tells her sympathetically. It’s as if postpartum depression were an inherited curse among the women of this family, though it’s one that Grace angrily rejects: she won’t just grin and bear it, she’s going to take them all down with her.
Lawrence has given numerous tour-de-force performances in her incredible career, but this is one that feels most fitting to describe as a force of nature. Grace often seems like chaos incarnate, with Lawrence channeling a primal violence that more often than not, is focused on herself. One sequence, in which Lawrence tears at the walls of the bathroom (and tears off her own fingernails in the process) could be a successor to Isabelle Adjani’s singularly terrifying performance in Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession — it’s visceral, unnerving, and thoroughly unhinged. Die My Love tests the many ways you can watch Lawrence destroy herself physically, emotionally, and mentally, and towards the end, it starts to feel like your own body is as worn out as hers.
At times, it feels like all Die My Love has to offer is a shattering Lawrence performance; Pattinson, while terrific, is mostly left to react to Grace’s outbursts, though Spacek offers a kind of wearier flavor of female suffering. But sometimes there’s nothing more you can ask for at the movies than to see a woman unraveling in a beautifully tragic, explosive way.
