Die My Love (2025)
Lynne Ramsay hasn’t directed a feature in over a decade, and Die My Love feels like the sort of project that accumulates during a long absence: ambitious, uncompromising, and somehow both overworked and undercooked. Jennifer Lawrence plays Grace, a writer and new mother whose mental state disintegrates in rural Montana. It’s challenging material, certainly. Whether it justifies two hours of your time is another matter entirely.
Grace and her partner Jackson (Robert Pattinson) move from New York to an inherited farmhouse, where she plans to write and they soon have a baby boy (whom they never name, which feels pointed but never quite lands). Jackson disappears frequently. Grace unravels spectacularly. The film tracks her descent into what appears to be postpartum psychosis, though Ramsay refuses to explicitly diagnose anything, presumably to avoid reducing Grace’s experience to medical terminology.
Lawrence commits utterly to the role. She’s unwashed, volatile, occasionally terrifying, and genuinely unpleasant to watch at times, which is rather the point. Think Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion, though without that film’s glacial control. Pattinson does what he can as the bewildered partner, but he’s essentially the straight man in a production that doesn’t particularly care about his perspective. Fair enough, perhaps, though it does leave the film feeling lopsided.
Technically, Die My Love is impressive. Seamus McGarvey shoots Montana as if the landscape itself might be suffering from anxiety, all strange light and oppressive beauty. Ramsay keeps us locked inside Grace’s fragmenting reality throughout, which becomes both the film’s greatest strength and its most exhausting limitation. You never escape her viewpoint. Which would be fine if that viewpoint evolved or revealed something beyond its initial premise.
But it doesn’t, in my view, and that’s the problem. Somewhere around the hour mark, you realise the film has said everything it intends to say about the unspeakable dimensions of maternal experience. Then it says it again. And again. There’s a birthday party scene where Grace tells another mother that everyone already talks endlessly about how hard parenting is, and it’s funny because it’s true. The irony, unintentional or otherwise, is that the film then proceeds to belabour its own point for another fifty minutes.
Ramsay clearly wants to explore how society handles women’s mental illness when it manifests in ways that breach acceptable boundaries. The broader implications about autonomy, identity, and the constraints of domestic life shimmer beneath the surface without ever becoming didactic. That’s admirable. Less admirable is the way the film mistakes endurance for insight, confusing the audience’s discomfort with actual emotional resonance.
Look, moments of mordant humour break through, and Lawrence’s performance deserves recognition even if the film surrounding it doesn’t quite earn her efforts. There’s genuine craft here. The cinematography alone could sustain a shorter film. But craft without purpose becomes mere exercise, and by the final twenty minutes, as events spiral toward an ending that feels both inevitable and arbitrary, you may find yourself checking your watch.
Die My Love will have its defenders, particularly among those who appreciate formally rigorous cinema that refuses easy answers. I understand that appeal. But there’s a difference between challenging your audience and simply testing their patience, and this film too often settles for the latter.