Review: Die My Love

Lynne Ramsay doesn’t make movies so much as she detonates them. Her films arrive fully formed, unruly, and emotionally ruinous, like an exposed nerve pulsing to the rhythm of grief and rage. Die My Love, her first film since 2017’s You Were Never Really Here, extends that legacy of discomfort, and in pairing Ramsay’s feral sensibilities with Jennifer Lawrence’s volcanic volatility, the result feels almost inevitable. There’s a sense, as the credits roll that these two artists were always meant to find each other. And when they do, they give birth to something unholy, grotesque, and astonishing.

Adapted from Ariana Harwicz’s 2012 novel, Die My Love follows Grace (Lawrence), a young mother unmoored by the contradictions of domestic life. She lives with her husband Jackson (Robert Pattinson) and their newborn in an inherited countryside house that looks less like a home than a mausoleum, filled with leaves, rats, and the muffled sounds of something dying. Ramsay, co-writing with Alice Birch and Enda Walsh, immediately thrusts us into Grace’s feverish world, one where sex, violence, and despair all share the same bed. The film opens with fire, literal and figurative, as Grace and Jackson tear through the house in a carnal whirlwind. It’s primal, almost pagan. Within minutes, Ramsay tells us everything we need to know: this woman is alive in ways that terrify her.

From there, Die My Love unravels like a scream muffled under bathwater. Grace’s solitude curdles into madness; her body and mind betray her with postpartum urges that twist from maternal warmth to animalistic need. Ramsay’s camera, guided by Seamus McGarvey’s jittery, luminous photography, rarely blinks. The world feels like it’s closing in on Grace, yet Ramsay refuses to pathologize her unraveling. This isn’t a film about depression, it’s about defiance, about what happens when a woman’s hunger for selfhood becomes intolerable to everyone around her.

Lawrence meets the film’s intensity head-on. Her performance is astonishingly physical as she writhes, howls, laughs, and lunges with a self-annihilating freedom that feels almost dangerous. She makes Grace magnetic and monstrous all at once. Ramsay gives her nowhere to hide. The close-ups are merciless, the dialogue sharp and fleeting, as if the words themselves might burn her tongue. At times, Grace’s wildness spills into absurdity, masturbating with a knife in hand, dancing manically to Toni Basil’s “Mickey”, but the absurdity is part of the terror. Ramsay’s empathy is radical: she refuses to look away from female rage, even when it’s grotesque or inconvenient.

Pattinson, meanwhile, plays Jackson as the embodiment of well-meaning impotence. He’s a man who confuses patience for understanding, watching his wife’s breakdown as if she were a storm cloud he might simply wait out. Their dynamic turns domestic life into a battlefield. When he’s away, the silence suffocates; when he returns, the noise does. Sissy Spacek, as Jackson’s mother, drifts in like a sleepwalking ghost from Ramsay’s Morvern Callar, adding a layer of intergenerational tragedy, one woman’s breakdown echoing another’s, each trapped in her own decaying rural purgatory.

There are moments when Die My Love teeters on the edge of chaos. Ramsay stitches scenes together with the rhythm of a panic attack, music (Lou Reed, Cocteau Twins, John Prine) slams in and out without warning, and McGarvey’s images veer between sublime and savage. It’s tonally erratic, yes, but so is psychosis. To complain about inconsistency in a film about mental disintegration is to miss the point entirely. Ramsay doesn’t offer neat arcs or tidy catharsis; she offers the storm.

If there’s a weakness, it’s structural. The film’s middle stretch sags as Grace wanders through her own delirium, and certain characters, most notably LaKeith Stanfield’s enigmatic motorcyclist, exist more as symbols than people. But Ramsay’s films have always been about sensation over sense, about translating internal chaos into cinematic form. Here, that chaos feels deeply earned.

In its final moments, Die My Love achieves something close to grace, though not the kind its protagonist is offered. Ramsay finds brutal beauty in collapse, the kind of transcendence that comes only when everything else is stripped away. It’s not her most accessible film, nor her most elegant, but it might be her rawest.

Lawrence, bloodied and incandescent, stands as both subject and spectacle, a woman scorched by her own existence. Ramsay hands her the match, and she burns the house down. The result is not a film you enjoy, but one you endure. And in the enduring, Die My Love becomes unforgettable.

4/5