‘Die My Love’ Review: Jennifer Lawrence Spirals Into Psychosis While Robert Pattinson

‘Die My Love’ Review: Jennifer Lawrence Spirals Into Psychosis While Robert Pattinson Plunges Into Despair in Lynne Ramsay’s Jarring Character Study

Lynne Ramsay has never shown much interest in making films that are easy to digest, her hard-edged psychological dramas refusing to offer comfort or provide tidy answers for the messy questions arising out of her characters’ upended lives. The uncompromising Scottish director has not gone soft in her jagged fifth feature, Die My Love. Giving a no-holds-barred performance that careens between disturbed reality and disturbing fantasy, blurring any dividing lines that separate them, Jennifer Lawrence plays a woman transplanted to the wide-open spaces of rural America, where marriage, motherhood and domesticity close in on her, chipping away at her sanity.

While screenwriters Enda Walsh, Ramsay and Alice Burch relocate Argentine writer Ariana Marwicz’s Lynchian 2012 debut novel from the French countryside, they stay true to its piercing focus on a woman battling her demons in a state of increasingly feverish isolation — whether she’s alone or in a room full of people.

Lawrence stars opposite Robert Pattinson as Grace and Jackson, a couple making a big change from New York to an unnamed spot nestled among tall trees and prairie grasslands. His family comes from the area and his mother, Pam (Sissy Spacek), and dotty father, Henry (Nick Nolte), still live nearby. Jackson has inherited a spacious, weather-beaten house from his uncle, who committed suicide in an unusual way that makes no sense and has zero bearing on the story.

Working in the boxy 4:3 aspect ratio, cinematographer Seamus McGarvey (who was DP on Ramsay’s We Need To Talk About Kevin) films the opening in a striking fixed-camera medium-wide shot as the couple first arrives at the house, walking in and out of the frame while entering and exiting different rooms.

Jackson tells Grace there’s no neighbors close by, so she can blast music as loud as she wants. Which she does, getting them both worked up to the point where they start boning on the floor. It’s established from the start that Grace’s appetite for sex is gargantuan.
But by the time their baby boy arrives, the couple’s passion in their union already appears to have been turned down a few degrees. This doesn’t sit well with Grace, who prowls around the yard on all fours like a panther and then flops on her back and shoves a hand down her pants while shooting a bored look at Jackson and their son on the porch. She ignores the housework and starts having sexual fantasies — or are they real? — about a hot biker (an underused LaKeith Stanfield) who keeps roaring by the house, sometimes circling back to get another look at her.

Ramsay shuffles the chronology for no good reason, jumping from after the baby’s birth back to Grace’s pregnancy (I’m sure I won’t be the only one thinking she’s expecting a second child). Pam, along with Jackson’s talkative aunts, pays a visit and they sit around clucking about motherhood. Grace doesn’t even feign interest, but she’s sweet and patient with Harry, who drifts in and out of lucidity. A thread about Pam sleepwalking, like many threads here, goes nowhere.

The first hour or so of the distended film is a bit of a trudge as Grace’s behavior grows increasingly erratic and she becomes convinced Jackson is screwing around while he’s away at work. Her general dissatisfaction is obvious in her rudeness to a chatty convenience store cashier and to women at a party, where she embarrasses Jackson by throwing off her clothes in the living room and then jumping into a pool full of kids in her skimpy underwear.

Pam tries reassuring her: “Everyone goes a little loopy in the first year after a baby.” But hurling herself through a glass door or smashing up the bathroom goes way beyond loopy. Early on, Jackson attempts to lighten the mood by bringing home a dog, which turns out to be a bad idea when it’s incessantly yappy and whiny and Grace has access to a shotgun. Jackson tries talking to her in the car to figure out what’s wrong and she causes an accident. Later, she informs him it’s been two-and-a-half months since they had sex and then gets verbally abusive when he fails to perform on command.

Postpartum depression keeps coming up, and that’s likely what triggered Grace’s psychosexual breakdown. But her connection to the baby seems fine. It’s the fraying connection to her husband that’s the problem.

Lawrence certainly goes for it in a physically demanding role and she’s always a dynamic presence. But Ramsay’s fondness for abrasive characters and her complete aversion to sentimentality, while admirable qualities in a filmography known for shaking up the quotidian with shock and horror, keep Grace at a distance. She’s a wild animal in a trap, and watching her snarl or claw at the walls or masturbate can only be interesting for so long.

It’s easier to feel something for Jackson, played by Pattinson with sensitivity and a touching spirit of forgiveness as he slides into despair. Asking Grace to marry him when she’s at her batshit craziest — truly a WTF? move — is an even bigger mistake than the dog, given that drunken weddings tend to make people shed their inhibitions. Or whatever Grace has left of them.

A stay in a mental health facility — while it doesn’t fix Grace, who’s mostly just acting the part of the happy wife and mother — rescues the movie from being one long, taxing bipolar episode. A joyful scene in which Grace and Jackson sing along to David Bowie’s “Kooks” in the car serves as a reminder that there’s a couple who really do love each other behind the strained union. Not for nothing does Ramsay herself sing Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” over the end credits.

Regardless of the film’s flaws — some of which might be due to it being rushed through the final stages of post to make the Cannes deadline — the closing stretch has a retroactive effect on everything that’s come before. It transforms Die My Love (the movie loses the comma in the novel’s title) from a self-destructive solo show to a thoughtful examination of a complex relationship and all the patience and understanding it requires.

Right before the end, an image of a forest fire seen briefly at the start returns in a more expansive way, showing one partner willing to go to any extreme to feel the freedom she craves and the other partner finally seeing her unruly desires and realizing he must make space for them. Ramsay’s film is hard to love, but that beautiful visual casts such an intense glow it pulls the whole unwieldy thing together.