Eight years after the brutal precision of You Were Never Really Here, Lynne Ramsay returns with a feverish, self-consciously bold psychodrama that teeters between brilliance and incoherence.
Adapted with Enda Walsh and Alice Birch from Ariana Harwicz’s 2012 novel, Die My Love transplants a tale of female collapse from rural France to an eerie decaying farmhouse in Montana, where isolation and new motherhood push Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) to the brink. Her initially tender, ineffectual husband, Jackson (Robert Pattinson), can only watch as marriage curdles into menace.
Ramsay wastes no time plunging viewers into Grace’s unravelling: animalistic lust, postpartum exhaustion and surreal visions collide in smeary light and woozy camerawork by Seamus McGarvey.
The first half has an edgy, electric charge: Lawrence and Pattinson prowl their domestic cage like beasts, the chopped-and-screwed soundtrack lurching from the achingly hip (Bowie, Cocteau Twins) to the profoundly uncool (Peggy Lipton).
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But as Grace’s psychosis deepens, Ramsay’s control frays. The film becomes a gaudy hallucination of smashed crockery, masturbation, animal abuse and spectral bikers; its feminist gestures (breastmilk mingling with ink, a wedding dissolving into madness) get lost in visual and emotional extravagance.
There are moments of searing power that echo the unsettling stories collected by Elizabeth Sankey in Witches, her postpartum documentary: a knife glints near a crib, the oppressive wail of an infant, and the shrieking of horses.
Unhappily, the relentless sensory assault and parade of provocations leave little room for empathy or inner life.
Lawrence, revisiting the madness of Mother!, is ferociously committed yet stranded inside a character defined by hysteria more than by humanity. Pattinson’s thoughtful shading is buried beneath the film’s descent into apocalyptic allegory.
Die My Love is uncompromising, hypnotic, brave and often indelible looking, even when the theatricality and fractured structure erode any emotional weight. The result is an impressively punishing, intermittently brilliant bad trip that may be the worst date movie ever made.
