Lynne Ramsay finds images that vibrate, but a story that barely stirs in this depiction of a collapsing woman and marriage; she builds a masterpiece of editing around a hollow centre.
★★★
Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love is a film of gorgeous, expressionistic editing in search of a better developed story. Too often it seems to catch Jennifer Lawrence in the process of workshopping her character rather than inhabiting her. She is too mannered for this style of filmmaking, a performance caught mid-process rather than in character. Robert Pattinson is more controlled, but has little to do except be useless and complain. LaKeith Stanfield is given nearly nothing: a wordless motorcyclist Grace is drawn to, who might be a hallucination, perhaps an ex-lover.
Grace (Lawrence) and Jackson (Pattinson) have just moved with their newborn son into a remote rural house inherited from his uncle, a once-idyllic property that quickly feels like a cage. The marriage, for unspecified reasons, quickly seems to erode. Grace tries to write but cannot. Jackson spends most of his time away “on jobs,” leaving her stranded between domestic expectation and creeping dread. The film deliberately blurs the boundary between Grace’s inner life and outer reality, so that hallucination and memory bleed together until we and Grace feel unmoored from time.
An early scene finds Grace slinking through tall grass on all fours, a knife glinting in her hand as she crawls catlike toward her baby. It is an image of maternal threat that Ramsay never quite dispels. From that moment on, the film is haunted by the possibility of harm, the sense that something unspeakable could happen at any moment. Ramsay has said the film is about love gone sour after a birth, and that critics are wrong to centre the postpartum psychosis storyline. But that is exactly what is onscreen. From its first moments, Die, My Love frames Grace as both victim and potential danger, and it never escapes the gravity of that fear. That’s not the framing you would expect from a film that claims to be about love gone wrong, and there’s a sense throughout that Ramsey isn’t quite managing to tell the story she wants to.
We learn nothing about Grace’s writing career except that she is a writer whose husband thinks she should be producing the Great American Novel. His own job is vague, long drives to remote sites for unclear reasons. We can tell he is screwing around by the ever-changing box of condoms in his glove compartment, but his act of gaslighting her (“you have seen these before”) goes nowhere. The film never investigates it. It feels like the film itself is depressed and refuses to develop its own story, a masterpiece of editing around an empty centre. Each of Ramsey’s previous films, from Ratcatcher to You Were Never Really Here, and especially the masterful Morvern Callar, had a strong narrative core to build out from. Not here.
Some of the imagery is masterful, though a forest-fire sequence feels blazingly overwrought. The details around Grace’s creative life are more interesting: her notebook covered with Muybridge horse photographs, a neat echo of Ramsay’s fascination with the mechanics of editing and the nature of film itself. It also echoes a black mare that recurs throughout, seen by Grace in dreams and through the trees, but it never quite resolves into symbol or story. It is an image reaching for meaning that the film never pins down. The maternal thread adds another layer: Sissy Spacek’s brief presence as Jackson’s mother hints at an unspoken lineage of exhaustion, as though motherhood itself is being passed down like an illness.
The film is quite good on the ways people ‘manage’ erratic or difficult women, with comments from Grace’s peers that walk a fine line between reassurance and minimisation, gently and beamingly suggesting that everyone “goes a little loopy” or “loses their mind” for six months after a birth. Ramsay catches that soft, well-intentioned condescension perfectly; the two-faced coin of sympathy and control.
Grace’s postpartum depression, perhaps worsened psychosis by cabin fever, eventually leads Jackson to have her committed to hospital, where she does not get much better. The film’s Academy ratio closes in on her with appropriate claustrophobia, while the sound design hums with insects and soft atonal feedback. The editing, Ramsay’s real instrument here, slices between panic, memory, and hallucination. The craft dazzles, superficially, but the drifting around in time and memory gives a sense of stasis to which Ramsey can’t grant narrative momentum. The film’s power is sensory more than psychological; it overwhelms rather than explains, built to be felt rather than understood, but this feels like a portrait without a point.
Die My Love plays at the London Film Festival this weekend, ahead of eventual theatrical and MUBI releases.
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