Die, My Love – first-look review | Little White Lies

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Die, My Love – first-look review

18 May 2025

Words by Hannah Strong

A woman in profile, with blonde hair, against a dark background.
A woman in profile, with blonde hair, against a dark background.
Lynne Ram­say finds a kin­dred spir­it in Jen­nifer Lawrence, join­ing forces for a blis­ter­ing por­trait of a woman on the verge of a ner­vous breakdown.

If you haven’t lived it, it’s hard to explain, that gnaw­ing dis­com­fort that makes you want to do some­thing cer­ti­fied-cap­i­tal‑C loony-bin-admis­sion Crazy. Walk into traf­fic or throw your body down the stairs or slash up your skin with a razor blade or bite one of your fin­gers off like a baby car­rot. It’s like a lot of things. Like bugs play­ing house under your skin. Like the hum of tele­vi­sion sta­t­ic after pro­gram­ming stops for the night. Like going out of your fuck­ing mind. Times used to be that they’d just call you hys­ter­i­cal and throw you in an insti­tu­tion indef­i­nite­ly; maybe try elec­tro­con­vul­sive ther­a­py or a lobot­o­my to make you more agree­able. (I joke about lobot­o­mies a lot with my oth­er men­tal­ly ill friends. I guess the idea of remov­ing a part of my brain to make me a lit­tle eas­i­er to man­age is pret­ty fun­ny, like that old Wan­da Sykes gag about the detach­able pussy.)

So here are Grace (Jen­nifer Lawrence) and Jack­son (Robert Pat­tin­son), trans­plants from New York who take on the ruin of his uncle’s old prairie home after he shot him­self. He’s a musi­cian, she’s a writer. They’re tru­ly, mad­ly, deeply in love, and soon enough baby makes three: a sweet, chub­by-cheeked lit­tle pop­pet who gur­gles and cries and bab­bles and does all the things babies do. Jack­son goes back out to work, then brings home a dog that barks con­stant­ly and piss­es on the floor. Grace plays with the baby and dances in her under­wear and mas­tur­bates and drinks from sweat­ing bot­tles of Bud­weis­er in the sum­mer heat. And Grace goes out of her fuck­ing mind.

Ari­ana Harwicz’s nov­el Die, My Love’ is a stream-of-con­scious­ness assault on the sens­es; a name­less woman lives with her hus­band and baby and in-laws in a rur­al French farm­house, and retains a ten­u­ous grasp on real­i­ty. Her thoughts are vio­lent and trag­ic and ani­mal – she fan­ta­sis­es about a neigh­bour with a motor­bike, about the crea­tures in the for­est, about killing and being killed. It’s easy to under­stand why a film­mak­er like Lynne Ram­say might be inter­est­ed in adapt­ing a text as wil­ful­ly off­putting, as trag­ic and com­plex and fer­al as Die, My Love’. And this filmable script – co-writ­ten with Enda Walsh and Alice Birch – doesn’t always work, cer­tain­ly not with the same heft of Morvern Callar or You Were Nev­er Real­ly Here, fre­net­ic and dis­joint­ed with lots of wrig­gling ten­drils and not much inter­est in explor­ing more than a hand­ful of them. (LaKei­th Stan­field gets short shrift as Grace’s mys­te­ri­ous bik­er neighbour.)

But the cin­e­ma of Lynne Ram­say is cin­e­ma of the sens­es, raw and del­i­cate and alive, like hold­ing a but­ter­fly cupped between your palms and feel­ing its wings beat against your skin. Jen­nifer Lawrence com­plete­ly under­stands this, inhibit­ing Grace with a total lack of van­i­ty as she crawls on all fours, as she vio­lent­ly wrecks a small bath­room, as she tries to come back into com­mune with her body after some­thing as desta­bil­is­ing as bring­ing anoth­er per­son into the world. She’s nev­er been bet­ter, vul­ner­a­ble and ter­ri­ble and total­ly unpre­dictable, matched game­ly by the always com­pelling Robert Pat­tin­son, utilised as a wet, sweaty, semi-use­less man com­plete­ly ill-suit­ed for Grace’s needs. But a clas­sic Wife vs Hus­band melt­down à la Scenes from a Mar­riage or Pos­ses­sion would be too tempt­ing and famil­iar; the heart of Die, My Love is that Grace and Jack­son do love each oth­er, do want each oth­er, under­scored by the use of John Prine and Iris DeMent’s coun­try clas­sic In Spite Of Our­selves’. Their romance is one of push­ing and pulling, a dance you don’t learn the steps to so much as feel in the geog­ra­phy of your bones. And some­times you go where the oth­er can’t fol­low. Love is its own sort of psychosis.

While much will be made of Die, My Loves gut-wrench­ing por­tray­al of post­na­tal men­tal ill­ness, a lit­tle-stud­ied and even lit­tler-under­stood con­di­tion that makes witch­es out of women, the expe­ri­ence Ram­say cap­tures in Grace’s sto­ry isn’t unique to those who have chil­dren or are ill in the after­math of their birth. Psy­chosis is much big­ger, much stranger and vicious, and while Grace is a new moth­er, her ill­ness isn’t sole­ly attrib­uted to her son’s arrival. She adores him, even if she looks at him like he’s an alien. And how then, if you are psy­chot­ic, can you divorce your ill­ness from your art? Grace’s hus­band, her moth­er-in-law and her well-mean­ing neigh­bours all keep ask­ing how her writ­ing is going. Grace tells them she’s quit. It’s less trou­ble than try­ing to explain blood comes eas­i­er than ink.

Ram­say artic­u­lates the inar­tic­u­late, here through her sat­u­rat­ed blues, yel­lows, browns and greens, the colours of grief and sick­ness and rot…but also new life, sum­mer skies, and hope. The Acad­e­my ratio is an homage to Repul­sion and Rosemary’s Baby that gives the sen­sa­tion of being boxed in (of climb­ing up the walls) and Sea­mus McGarvey’s cin­e­matog­ra­phy ren­ders the beau­ti­ful ter­ri­ble and vice ver­sa. Ram­say also con­tributes music to the film’s noisy, messy, inten­tion­al­ly unteth­ered score, includ­ing the exquis­ite cov­er of Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart’ that plays over the film’s cred­its – but Die, My Love isn’t a eulo­gy. It’s a for­est fire, destruc­tive, angry, hot­ter than hell. And when it burns out, some­thing new springs out from the ground.

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