Review: Die My Love – A woman under the influence
Directed by Lynne Ramsay
Starring Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Pattinson, Nick Nolte, Sissy Spacek
8/10
Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson seem like a dream team as an on-screen couple, coming together for Die My Love, but Hunger Games and Twilight fans should be warned of these actors’ propensity for more audacious work—this film is more for the fans of mother! and The Lighthouse.
Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) is a new mum, living in the secluded woods with her boyfriend Jackson (Robert Pattinson), close to his mum Pam (Sissy Spacek). What appears to be an idyllic setting for this young family soon unravels further and further into domestic chaos. Grace’s grievances with her postpartum depression, as well as the sexlessness of her relationship and her suspicions of his infidelity, and her own temptations towards infidelity, make her so unpredictably and sometimes violently unhinged.
Die My Love digs itself right into the internal turmoil and emotional instability of Grace, and although the film doesn’t quite get into anything truly surreal, it still gives off a sense of ambiguity as to if certain scenes are actually happening or not. Along with the nebulous nature of this film, Lawrence is so damn comfortable in her deeply uncomfortable role as someone who’s troubled in an indefinable way. Plunging thoroughly into this existential depression, Lawrence makes being bored look so scary. Her performance appears as improvised as real life itself, with moments of sudden heightened emotions bursting out in desperate and childish ways. It can make her character as frightening as she is suddenly hilarious.
There is the sense that nothing really accumulates from one scene to the next, as if any conflict has been extinguished and forgotten about as the film plays on. But this only goes to embellish the couple’s frustration with their horribly human problem that seemingly has no solution. What does accumulate is the intensity of Grace’s dissatisfaction with her place in the world—she’s happy being a new mother, but everything else feels off.
At two hours long, Die My Love can get bogged down by the sense of the repetitiveness of these sequences (that sometimes feel more like character-based vignettes). Through this particular internal pacing, this character study of a film does a great job at insinuating all these growing troubles with Grace, but towards the film’s devastating climax (well, depending on how you interpret it), it can feel a bit reiterative and even masochistically punishing towards the poor woman.
Die My Love doesn’t attempt to give solutions to her kind of depression, as it knows how out of grasp explaining this kind of emotional complexity is. Instead it offers some kind of catharsis from how much of an open wound it is. There’s a push-pull conflict the film has with how objective it wants to be in showing the reality of how she’s appearing to everyone (including the audience) and how subjective it is in presenting itself like it’s right in the mind of this woman.
DAVID MORGAN-BROWN