Die My Love: Lynne Ramsay unlocks a fearless performance from Jennifer Lawrence

• Reviewed from the 2025 Cannes Film Festival

Harrowing, beautiful and very possibly cursed, Lynne Ramsay’s magnificently unlovable adaptation of Ariana Harwicz’s novel begins as it refuses to continue, in quiet. Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson) are poking around a deserted house by a forest that soon will not be seen for the trees. They are about to relocate here from New York, dreaming up an office in which Grace will never write a book and a studio in which Jackson will never record an album. They’re wary but rock’n’roll-mad for each other, drunk on cheap domestic beer and the delusion that love – and fleshy, uninhibited sex – is all they need. We know they’re wrong. We have already seen these woods burn.

The story is a thin, juddering downward spiral, told in the cinema of smithereens, with the energy of a bottle hurled at a mirror. Grace and Jackson are moving into a deceased uncle’s house to be closer to Jackson’s ageing parents, Pam and Henry (Sissy Spacek and Nick Nolte). They marry. They fuck a lot. Grace gets pregnant. They fuck less. Grace has the baby and unravels and we unravel right along with her, through episodes of brutality, buoyancy and boredom, where time doesn’t move in a straight line but in jagged, erratic zigzags and where reality bleeds helplessly into fantasy. Die My Love, in which Ramsay’s extraordinarily vivid filmmaking unlocks a whole new level of fearless, full-body commitment from Jennifer Lawrence, is less about a woman’s mental breakdown than it is a woman’s mental breakdown; sometimes you can feel your mind snapping tight against the possibility that it will break down too.

In a subversion of the Betty Blue (1986) school of female neurosis eroticised for male titillation, Grace’s disintegration is frequently described in terms of her needling, burdensome sexuality. She masturbates compulsively. She harangues Jackson for his lack of sexual interest in her after she’s had the baby who, incidentally, is strangely incidental, constantly there and constantly cared for but almost always just referred to as “the boy.” She conjures a lover (LaKeith Stanfield) out of a mysterious passing motorcyclist and imagines Jackson, frequently absent, having tacky trysts with roadside diner waitresses. She crawls through the long grass where they used to make love amongst the buzzing bees and purring panthers of Paul Davies’ expressionistic soundscape, only now she’s alone with a kitchen knife in her hand. As a rebuke to the sexism of cinematic tradition, here female hysteria is portrayed not as a diminishing but as an ungovernably expanding state. There are so many more ways to be mad than to be sane.

There are some lovely tender moments, as when Grace goes to help a fragile Henry and they share a glance of profoundly kind understanding in a kitchen. There’s the time when she and Jackson duet along to John Prine and Iris DeMent’s In Spite of Ourselves – once again, Ramsay shows a knack for the perfect soundtrack cut. And there are flashes of humour in Grace’s mordant reactions to a cluelessly cooing cashier or an Amelia Earhart children’s book or another young mother whose own maternal dissatisfactions can be more easily managed with wine and girl-talk. But mostly, in its solipsism, Grace’s escalating derangement cannot but push all the supporting characters to the margins. From the ineffectual Jackson (selflessly played by Pattinson) to the grieving Pam (a wonderful, flinty but warm Spacek), everyone in Grace’s lonely orbit is repelled or rebuffed. It’s a crisp reflection of Ramsay and Lawrence’s unapologetic approach to a film that provides no easy access points for sympathy or identification, that asks a lot of the viewer and then pointedly, somehow admirably, ignores the answer.  

If there is any comparison piece, it’s probably Darren Aronofsky’s mother! (2017) but that showed Lawrence’s character going berserk under the pressures of a stifling marriage. Here, Grace’s mania is all her own, originating from somewhere inside her own body, making her unavailable for rescue by anybody else. It builds up a feeling of Academy-ratio claustrophobia that does take its toll by the end when it’s hard not to wish Ramsay had been as savage in excision as she was with You Were Never Really Here (2017) – a film so ruthlessly edited it became a Jenga-like exercise in how much you can remove from a story while leaving it structurally sound. But Die My Love is a different, snarling animal, that finds Ramsay and Lawrence in ferociously maximalist sync, conspiring without compromise on making us feel like a character who, above all, above anything, does not want to feel this way: in love with herself, in fear for herself and in desperate, spitting, spite of herself.