Director: Lynne Ramsay
Writers: Ariana Harwicz, Lynne Ramsay, Enda Walsh
Stars: Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Pattinson, LaKeith Stanfield
Synopsis: In a remote forgotten rural area, a mother struggles to maintain her sanity as she battles with psychosis.
Every time Lynne Ramsay has a new film ready for us, it is cause for celebration. Since she makes films so sporadically, her last one being You Were Never Really Here back in 2017, each release feels like an event for cinephiles worldwide, much like Terence Malick, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Jane Campion, amongst others. This high anticipation comes from her reputation as a singular, prominent director with a unique vision and knack for grim, psychological storytelling. Like those filmmakers mentioned, Ramsay emphasizes images, poetry, and feeling rather than dialogue and exposition; she shows the importance of crafting daunting, textured imagery left imprinted in our minds for an extended period.
Some examples of her striking imagery are the opening of Ratcatcher, the Christmas tree with flickering lights against the boyfriend’s dead body in Morvern Callar (my favorite film by Ramsay), and the red paint-covered house in We Need to Talk About Kevin. Many contemporary directors don’t give this much attention to the images they create. That’s why Ramsay stands out in the medium. Her imagery has meaning, creating a poetic visual language distinct to her. After eight long years, Ramsay has a new visceral experience, Die, My Love (screening in competition at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival), adapted from Ariana Herwicz’s novel of the same name.
Once again working with source material, Ramsay presents the fragmented story of Grace (a magnificent Jennifer Lawrence), a writer who becomes increasingly uneasy on her isolated estate in the countryside. After living in New York for a while, Grace moves to the home of her partner’s, Jackson (Robert Pattinson), now-deceased uncle, Harry, who killed himself a while ago. This huge house seems like the perfect place for them to start their family, as Grace and Jackson are expecting their first child. The two are in love, desperately and passionately; they cannot be without one another, with Lawrence and Pattinson’s chemistry oozing from the screen in these initial moments. However, this idyllic start soon starts to unravel.
As the days pass, Grace withdraws from both her picture-perfect “white picket fence” life and her newborn. She exhibits some erratic, violent behavior. She spends most of her time alone in the house, unable to write as her thoughts are blurred, and cleaning a spotless house. It is all getting to her head. She reaches out to Jackson for salvation, but Grace is too far submerged in melancholy to recover from this easily. The self-harm is not only physical, but also psychological, the latter becoming an even more significant affliction. Her psyche distorts once Karl (LaKeith Stanfield), her motorbike-riding neighbor, appears on screen.
You don’t know if Karl is actually real or a figment of Grace’s deteriorating mental state. Fantasy and reality blur in a way only Ramsay can render, where chaos and grace rarely meet, but when they do, the result is devastating emotional catharsis. The protagonist remains unnamed in the novel, with Herwicz immersing us in her stream-of-consciousness. Ramsay retains that intimacy by embodying the character as Grace, giving us a similarly unfiltered glimpse into her unraveling mind. And she, although in a more streamlined yet equally unconventional fashion, crafts a very similar experience for the viewer. You are inside Grace’s head, going through every nook and cranny, memory and feeling, to a point where it becomes an exasperating view, but deliberately so.
Think back to her previous feature, where Joaquin Phoenix’s Joe, a traumatized veteran, is overtaken by his nightmares and isolation, leading him on a downward spiral, with reality being blurred with each step he takes. The same happens to Grace, as she dismantles her house–the only place where she can reign in her pain with utmost control–and Ramsay lets Lawrence fiercely play in that madhouse. And it isn’t the first time Lawrence has been placed on a deconstructed, mad canvas. In the 2017 feature from Aronofsky, mother!, she was tasked with showcasing frenzy and madness for two hours straight; with each passing minute, the setting became as frenetic as Lawrence’s performance.
The difference between the visions of Aronofsky and Ramsay is that the latter adds more humanity and empathy to the character Lawrence plays, instead of being a conduit for distress and suffering as it is in mother!. It is symbolic in Aronofsky’s film, and her character’s pain adds to the parable. Yet, I think some of it is done for exasperation and provocation (and I liked the film for such off-the-wall behavior). In Die, My Love, Ramsay uses the distress to reflect on postpartum depression, a topic rarely discussed in cinema, as well as blindsided love and domestic life. This is why each movement, expression, and look Lawrence’s Grace does, whether violent or gentle, feels genuine and heartbreaking.
The violent or brash moments aren’t even the ones that feel the most dangerous; the tender and gentle scenes have a trepidation to them, where you don’t know when Grace is going to strike and eat Jackson alive, like a lion watching its prey from afar, waiting for the perfect moment. It is the effect of Ramsay’s double-headed love story, where devotion fills the atmosphere in desolation, and chaos is the natural sensation. And after resting with the film for some days now, I have grown to like it more for that. Even when Jackson can’t do anything to save or help his despondent Grace, the commitment transmits–the unwillingness to let the love, as its title says, die and rot amidst it all.
