In retrospect, the collision of Lynne Ramsay and Jennifer Lawrence seems fated. The Scottish filmmaker forged her reputation with character-driven dramas like Morvern Callar, We Need to Talk About Kevin, and You Were Never Really Here. Her films — often led by critically heralded performers — push audiences to uncomfortable emotional spaces of desire, rage, and grief. Meanwhile, the American actress broke through with such a drama, Debra Granik’s riveting Winter’s Bone, which earned Lawrence her first Oscar nod. Then, she rose to stardom by embracing roles of women on the edge in The Hunger Games, Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle, and Mother!
Through this lens, Die My Love seems inevitable, but that doesn’t make it any less remarkable. Ramsay and Lawrence’s powers combine to create a ruthlessly savage portrait of female desire and wrath. The result is something feral and bloody fantastic.
Die My Love is a stirring drama in the vein of Hedda Gabler.
Credit: Kimberley French / MUBI
Adapted from Ariana Harwicz’s novel of the same name, Die My Love focuses on a young mother named Grace (Lawrence), who struggles within the confines of her seemingly settled life. (Hedda, can you hear her?) In the screenplay by Ramsay, Alice Birch, and Enda Walsh, the film begins with Grace and her partner, Jackson (Robert Pattinson), pulling his pick-up truck up to the family home that has been passed down to them, ahead of the birth of their first child.
Cinematographer Seamus McGarvey resolutely sets the camera statically inside the house, which is littered with leaves as if it’s been nearly forgotten. From this wide shot, we can see the couple arrive through an open door. We hear their excited chatter and finally see them come into the building, bringing life with them. Grace, in a silky red skirt, practically blooms as she enters a room. And before they even sweep the floors, she’s pinned Jackson to them, naked and christening the place as theirs.
Their lovemaking isn’t the standard stuff of Hollywood movies, all soft lighting and carefully revealed flesh. Instead, Die My Love delivers a frank and carnal sex scene. Grace claws at Jackson like a predatory cat. It’s with this same intensity she will later crawl on all four through their sprawling wilderness of a lawn or paw into her own panties as their fever for each other cools.
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Swiftly through physicality, Lawrence and Ramsay establish the intensity of Grace, which will not be shrunk by her role as wife or mother. So, when work pulls Jackson away from the house, leaving Grace to their baby and herself, she begins to spiral in search of who she has become in this circumstance. And her rage, even at its most extreme, is achingly relatable.
Having recently seen Hedda, it was easy to see a line of shared vexation between these two anti-heroines. Where their families, lovers, and society would happily shove them into placid roles of feminine domesticity, their spirits rage against such flattening of their lives. In response, both react wildly — though Grace is less strategic than Hedda.
Jennifer Lawrence is on fire in Die My Love.
Credit: Kimberley French / MUBI
Grace’s passions push her to explode, sometimes in outbursts of joyful dancing or spirited song, sometimes in vicious words or violence. Within the film, characters sympathetically diagnose Grace with postpartum depression. But even this feels like a box to confine her.
Lawrence throws herself fearlessly into Grace’s mental breakdown. She laughs, screams, flails, and fights with an electrifying abandon. She’s so achingly alive onscreen that Pattinson, renowned for his onscreen intensity, withers beside her, which suits their characters’ dynamic. Jackson seems intoxicated by Grace’s free spirit, but also infuriated he can’t pin her down as she might him. From their increasing animosity, tension churns this domestic drama into a thriller, because something has got to give.
And yet, as fiery as Lawrence gets — bearing her body, yearning, and rage with equal bravado — the scenes that hit me the hardest in Die My Love are when Grace shares a sharp softness. There’s a beautiful and humane paradox built in this protagonist. Her snarls and anti-social behaviors, like plunging into a pool in her underwear at a family party, might startle the neighbors and embarrass Jackson, but they don’t mean she doesn’t care about others or know how to.
Credit: Kimberley French / MUBI
While motherhood might feel like a shackle, she loves her baby boy and expresses gentle, ardent affection for him. But before he even arrives, she does the same for her father-in-law, Harry (Nick Nolte), who is addled by dementia. Where others treat Harry like a child, with lilting pleads for obedience, Grace talks to him like they’re sharing a secret, like they understand each other. And perhaps they do better than any other because of how everyone else infantilizes them, instead of meeting them where they are.
While Grace is soft with her son and father-in-law, Lawrence performs that gentleness with an intellectual sharpness that complicates even these moments of warm love. She and Ramsay build a woman who so resolutely rejects archetypes like mother and wife that Grace practically vibrates on screen, so fully formed that she can barely be contained in a 2D medium.
Die My Love is a radical and riveting melodrama that rejects sentimentality.
Credit: Kimberley French / MUBI
In this role, Lawrence will writhe on the floor, prowl on all fours through tall grass, and claw at the floral walls of a battered bathroom. She sinks her teeth into every moment so that Die My Love bleeds. Its premise might seem the stuff of Lifetime movies about failing marriages or maternal frustrations. But under Ramsay’s direction, the story is more slippery and surreal, dangerously dedicated to psychological and emotional truth over a comforting narrative. There’s a frankness to everything from sex and breastfeeding to the comfort and casualness Grace has with her own body. And perhaps especially now, when the U.S. government is pushing an agenda to reduce a woman’s control over her reproductive rights and gender-affirming care, this feels audacious and radical.
Grace’s journey will make you squirm, perhaps cackle. But in her messy quest for something beyond being boxed in, she offers a radical freedom to her audience. In the discomfort of watching her bicker, battle, and act out, an excitement of possibility burns. Where could this lead, not just for her — but for us? Will you walk away from Die My Love rattled? Feeling recognized? Or dared to be reborn?