You have to respect actors who attain fame in blockbusters and then seek out challenging projects that alienate large portions of their fan base. The barometer for that alienation is CinemaScore, which polls opening-night viewers to see if they got the movie experience they hoped for.
In 2017, Jennifer Lawrence appeared in Darren Aronofsky’s Mother!, which earned a rare F CinemaScore. Now she’s on local screens in Die My Love, an adaptation of Ariana Harwicz’s novel from Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay (We Need to Talk About Kevin, You Were Never Really Here). The D+ CinemaScore suggests that fans of Lawrence and her costar, Robert Pattinson of Twilight fame, were not impressed. But how is the movie?
The deal
Young couple Grace (Lawrence) and Jackson (Pattinson) leave New York City to move into his late uncle’s rural homestead in Montana. Soon they become parents, to the joy of Jackson’s mom (Sissy Spacek), who is struggling to adjust to her recent widowhood.
Grace herself is struggling to adjust to her new life as the mother of an infant — or perhaps she’s always just been struggling. Jackson’s long absences infuriate her, as does his lack of interest in sex. Once a writer, Grace can no longer concentrate, and she has no interest in cleaning the house or making small talk at the mini-mart. Instead, she stalks through tall grass on all fours and has sexual fantasies about her neighbor (LaKeith Stanfield), who rides a motorcycle. Jackson’s surprise gift of a dog — more to keep him company than Grace — doesn’t help.
As Grace spirals toward a breakdown, she acts out with increasing violence toward herself and others. Yet she rejects any suggestion that she might be suffering from postpartum depression or having trouble bonding to her son, insisting, “He’s perfect. It’s everything else that’s fucked.”
Will you like it?
I found myself appreciating Die My Love primarily as an antidote to tradwife propaganda. Like so many influencer accounts, the film serves up scene after scene of a beautiful blond woman — with professionally styled hair and makeup — cavorting in green fields and caring for her infant in gorgeously photographed settings. But every single one of these scenes is terrifying, cringe-inducing or both.
If tradwives claim their lifestyle is primal and natural, Grace embodies the dark side of that ideal: feral, antisocial. Fiercely protective, she never actively harms her child, yet her habits of rambling in the nude, snarling at her peers and toting around a kitchen knife wouldn’t be well received at church. As for submission to her husband, don’t even think about it.
That description may make Die My Love sound subversive and fun, like a John Waters concoction, so I want to underline that it’s not. Ramsay doesn’t make fun movies. She makes no-holds-barred studies of people crumbling under the weight of their lives, people who throw caution and convention to the winds because they have little left to lose.
As in the director’s previous work, the screenplay of Die My Love (by Ramsay, Enda Walsh and Alice Birch) leaves backstory and mundane details to our imagination. What kind of writer or person was Grace before moving to Montana? Was she always this unstable, or did isolation push her over the edge? How is she diagnosed when she finally receives treatment? We never find out, perhaps because those things don’t matter to Grace. She seems unsure what does matter to her besides her child, or even what’s real.
Lawrence brings us inside that itching sense of unreality in a powerfully physical way. She gives Grace a sarcastic deadpan that makes for unlikely humorous moments: mean girl one second, powder keg the next.
Ramsay’s visual storytelling completes the work of putting us in Grace’s inner world. Shot on Kodak’s Ektachrome by Seamus McGarvey, Die My Love offers shivers of the surreal. Day-for-night shooting gives an eerie beauty to nocturnal scenes, while the Academy aspect ratio emphasizes Grace’s sense of being confined. Wandering country roads in her slip, she could be trapped in an antique photo.
None of this craft won over the viewers who gave Die My Love a low CinemaScore, and I admit I see their point of view. The film has no levels; it doesn’t take us on a journey so much as rub our nose in one beautifully detailed patch of scorched earth. An artwork this rich in visual symbolism will find its fans, but for me, Die My Love was a suffocating vibe in search of a story. Try as we may to distance ourselves from Grace’s chaos, we can’t, because the repetition and circularity of her suffering madden us, too.
If you like this, try…
A Woman Under the Influence (1974; HBO Max, Kanopy, rentable): Some have compared Die My Love to John Cassavetes’ Oscar-nominated drama, for which Gena Rowlands won a Golden Globe Award as a suburban wife and mother experiencing a breakdown.
Nightbitch (2024; Hulu): For a film that more directly addresses the highs and lows of stay-at-home motherhood, try Marielle Heller’s whimsical drama about a mom (Amy Adams) whose frustration might be turning her into a literal bitch. Warning: Like Die My Love, it features pet death.
We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011; Kanopy, MUBI, Peacock, Philo, Pluto TV, Prime Video, Tubi, YouTube Primetime, rentable): In this adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s novel, director Ramsay dealt with a taboo subject: How does a mother (Tilda Swinton) handle the realization that her child is downright evil?
This article appears in The Winter Preview Issue 2025.
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