Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love is not a film designed for comfort. It arrives with the intensity of a fever dream and the jagged edges of a raw nerve, refusing to offer easy answers or tidy resolutions to the existential nightmare unfolding on screen.
This is film as immersion therapy, plunging viewers headfirst into the psychological disintegration of Grace, a young mother trapped in rural Montana whose grip on reality splinters with each passing day. At countless points through this film, I found myself questioning my own sanity and wondering what was actually happening. Was it real? Was it a metaphor? Or was it a dream or a hallucination? Honestly, by the end, I was asking those same questions about the film as a whole.
What’s Die My Love About?
Based on Ariana Harwicz’s 2012 novel, “Die My Love follows Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson), a couple who relocate from New York City to Jackson’s inherited family home in the Montana wilderness. What begins as an idyllic escape quickly transforms into something far more sinister. After the birth of their child, Grace descends into severe postpartum depression that morphs into full psychosis, her sense of self eroding as the walls close in around her.
The movie takes us through Grace’s increasingly disturbing behavior: crawling through tall grass with a butcher knife, throwing herself through glass doors, tearing sinks from bathroom walls, and engaging in primal acts of desperation that blur the line between sexuality and violence.
The film’s structure deliberately disorients. Time becomes elastic and ambiguous, with scenes unfolding in a non-linear fashion that mirrors Grace’s fractured mental state. We see glimpses of Grace and Jackson’s passionate early days in their relationship juxtaposed against the numbing monotony of new parenthood.
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Jackson’s mother, Pam (Sissy Spacek), lives nearby and struggles with her own tenuous grip on reality following the recent death of her husband, Harry (Nick Nolte). There’s also Karl (LaKeith Stanfield), another new parent who may or may not be real, existing somewhere in the liminal space between Grace’s imagination and actual encounters.
Die My Love Movie Trailer
Die My Love Movie Review: What I Did and Didn’t Like
Shot on 35mm film in a claustrophobic 4:3 aspect ratio, the film traps audiences in Grace’s perspective. Even when she roams through vast Montana landscapes, there’s no escape. Cinematographer Seamus McGarvey utilized Kodak Ektachrome reversal stock to create a skewed, almost dreamlike visual signature that enhances the film’s disorienting quality. The result is a viewing experience that feels suffocating and overwhelming, mirroring the protagonist’s psychological imprisonment.
But what really made Die My Love so compelling, and simultaneously so maddening (for me), is its refusal to conform to traditional narrative structures. Ramsay has created a mood piece that prioritizes emotional truth over plot mechanics, and the results are both mesmerizing and exasperating. The film succeeds brilliantly in making you feel Grace’s isolation and desperation. The use of that boxy 4:3 frame constantly reminds us that Grace is trapped, no matter how much open space surrounds her.
The dark humor threaded throughout is unexpected and effective. Grace’s interactions with the people in her life carry an absurdist quality that prevents the film from becoming oppressively bleak. When Jackson brings home an incessantly barking dog expecting Grace to care for it while he travels for work, the scene plays as both tragedy and dark comedy. Lawrence’s commitment to these moments of black humor gives them an uncomfortable authenticity.
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The Script
Working from a screenplay she co-wrote with playwrights Enda Walsh and Alice Birch, Ramsay transforms Harwicz’s internal monologue into a predominantly visual experience. The novel is written in a stream-of-consciousness style, filled with poisonous thoughts and maternal ambivalence, but Ramsay wisely avoids leaning too heavily on voiceover or dialogue-heavy exposition. Instead, the script relies on physicality and behavior to convey Grace’s psychological state.
The screenplay’s greatest strength lies in its resistance to easy categorization or diagnosis. Grace is never explicitly diagnosed with postpartum depression or psychosis. There are no scenes with doctors prescribing medication or family interventions with clear treatment plans. This omission is deliberate. Director Lynne Ramsay pushed back against critics who labeled the film simply as a postpartum depression story, stating at Cannes: “This whole postpartum thing is just bullshit. It’s not about that. It’s about a relationship breaking down, it’s about love breaking down, and sex breaking down after having a baby. And it’s also about a creative block.”
The script explores how Grace’s identity as a writer has been subsumed by motherhood, how sexual intimacy transforms (or disappears) after childbirth, and how isolation can accelerate mental decline. Grace’s struggles become universal even as they manifest in extreme, specific ways.
A Complicated Service to Maternal Mental Health?
Yet this ambiguity raises questions about the film’s service to those dealing with postpartum depression. Does Die My Love do justice to this experience?
The answer is complicated. On one hand, the film’s unflinching portrayal of maternal ambivalence and psychological suffering gives voice to feelings many new mothers experience but fear acknowledging. The shame, the isolation, the sense of losing yourself while everyone expects you to be grateful and fulfilled… these emotional truths resonate powerfully.
Lawrence herself, who experienced postpartum depression after filming, noted in interviews that watching the film helped her understand Grace’s mindset: “I hadn’t experienced postpartum while filming, but I knew that suicide is a leading cause of death among new moms. I couldn’t understand how she could do that because I loved my baby so much. But once I experienced postpartum, I realized it has nothing to do with love; it’s about feeling imperfect next to something so perfect.”
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On the other hand, by refusing to name Grace’s condition or explicitly show her receiving help, the film risks leaving viewers without resources or hope. And, while artistically bold, the ending (don’t worry, no spoilers here), may not offer much solace to those seeking affirmation that recovery is possible.
Ramsay’s comments about the film’s metaphorical nature suggest she views Grace’s self-destruction as a kind of liberation. Speaking about the ending (again, trust me, no spoilers), she explained: “I was trying my hardest. It’s not in the book. I just felt like she wants to burn the world down. It’s a metaphorical liberation.”
This framing positions the film more as a Gothic tale about a woman who refuses to be domesticated. Whether this artistic choice serves or undermines the understanding of postpartum mental health issues remains an open question….
The Performances
Jennifer Lawrence in ‘Die My Love’
Jennifer Lawrence as Grace
The performances in Die My Love are without question the film’s strongest element. Jennifer Lawrence delivers what is arguably the most challenging and uncompromising work of her career. This is not the charismatic, accessible Lawrence of The Hunger Games or Silver Linings Playbook. This is something feral, raw, and completely untethered. She filmed many of these scenes while four-and-a-half months pregnant with her second child, adding an extraordinary physical and emotional layer to an already demanding role.
Lawrence’s Grace is simultaneously seductive and repellent, maternal and destructive, vulnerable and terrifying. She shifts from catatonic emptiness to explosive rage within single takes, her body language morphing from predatory crawling to collapsed exhaustion.
The physicality of the performance is stunning. Whether she’s scratching bathroom walls until her nails bleed, climbing inside a refrigerator, or prowling on all fours through grass like an animal stalking prey, Lawrence commits completely. There’s no vanity here, no concern for likability or traditional markers of movie-star glamour. She embodies Grace’s dissolution with a freedom that feels almost dangerous to watch.
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Critics have already begun discussing Oscar potential for Lawrence’s performance, which would be her fifth nomination. The comparison to her work in 2017’s Mother! is inevitable, but this feels even more visceral and unprotected.
Robert Pattinson in ‘Die My Love’
Robert Pattinson as Jackson
Robert Pattinson wisely portrays Jackson in a deliberately understated manner, creating a stark contrast to Lawrence’s volcanic performance. His Jackson is not a villain, but rather a well-meaning man completely out of his depth. Pattinson channels an everyman quality, portraying a thirty-something man-child who brings home a dog, expecting his struggling wife to care for it, and suggests his wife “talk” about her feelings, while fundamentally not understanding the severity of her crisis.
The performance is effective precisely because Jackson’s ordinariness makes Grace’s extraordinary suffering more isolating. Pattinson and Lawrence share genuine chemistry, particularly in the film’s opening sequences, where they communicate through physicality rather than words, nuzzling, biting, wrestling in primal displays of desire.
The Supporting Cast
Sissy Spacek delivers a quietly powerful performance as Pam, Jackson’s widowed mother, who recognizes something of her own struggles in Grace’s unraveling. Spacek brings maternal warmth tinged with her own grief and instability, sleepwalking with a gun in scenes that blur the line between dark comedy and genuine menace. Her scenes with Lawrence crackle with understanding, two women adrift in their own ways, connected by shared loss and dislocation.
LaKeith Stanfield’s Karl exists in an ethereal space that keeps audiences guessing whether he’s real or a figment of Grace’s imagination. His understated performance adds to this ambiguity, making his interactions with Grace feel simultaneously grounded and dreamlike. The film never definitively confirms Karl’s reality, leaving viewers to question how many of his scenes actually happened versus whether they exist purely in Grace’s fractured psyche (one of my many ‘what the heck is going on’ moments…).
Overall Thoughts
Die My Love is not for everyone, and it doesn’t pretend to be. Ramsay has crafted a film that exists in the space between arthouse provocation and genuine psychological horror, borrowing techniques from Antonin Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty to break down the barriers that keep audiences feeling safe.
The film works best when understood not as a straightforward narrative but as a sensory experience designed to replicate Grace’s mental state. The aggressive sound design, with blaring rock music and deafening slams that assault the ears… the claustrophobic framing that traps characters in doorways and corners… the time distortions that make it impossible to track how much time has passed… all of these choices serve to destabilize viewers in ways that mirror the protagonist’s experience. When you emerge from Die My Love, you should feel like you’ve been through something, like you’ve barely survived tumultuous rapids. That’s the point.
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But does that make a good film? The question of whether this movie serves those experiencing postpartum depression remains complex. It offers validation for dark feelings rarely depicted on screen, but it also provides no roadmap for recovery or healing. Grace’s story ends in metaphorical immolation, and while Ramsay intends this as liberation rather than tragedy, the distinction may be lost on viewers seeking hope.
Perhaps the film’s greatest service is simply its willingness to depict maternal struggle without sentimentality or easy resolution, to show that sometimes love isn’t enough to fix what’s broken, and that the societal pressure to perform gratitude for motherhood can itself become suffocating.
However, this one just didn’t work for me – despite the beautiful cinematography and incredible performances.
Most people who have seen a few director Park movies will agree that he has one of the most creative and crazy minds out there. I’m happy to join the choir. This marks the 55-year-old filmmaker’s inaugural foray into the Black comedy subgenre, although we are cognizant of his cheekiness.
Director Park’s examination of the economic class structures in South Korea, as evidenced by Man-soo’s dismissal, is as bleak as it is in any other urbanized capitalist nation. It is, after all, based on an American novel, but it exploits this premise to build a powerful Black comedy. With No Other Choice‘s straightforward plot, he deconstructs the conventions of masculinity under a capitalistic umbrella through a kooky but always funny atmosphere. One equally funny and depressing recurring gag is post-firing affirmations that many of the unemployed former breadwinners use as an excuse to continue their self-pity wallowing. Man-soo’s dubious scheme reflects himself in his fellow compatriots, who share the same ill fate. They all neglect their loving families, becoming real-time losers to the significant impact of the capitalist culture on the common man. As the plot develops, Park explores the twisted but captivating development of this man regaining his sense of self and spine… You know, through murder.
As this social satire unfolds in dark, humorous ways, No Other Choice is a rare example of style and substance working together. Director Park throws every stylistic option he can at the wall, and almost everything sticks. Mainly because his imaginative lens – crossfades, dissolves, and memorable feats – is both visually captivating and enriching to Man-soo’s mission. The film encroaches on noir-thriller sensibilities, especially with its modern setting. Man-soo’s choices become more engrossing and inventive, proving timely even in its most familiar beats while personalizing every supporting character.
Director Park and his reunion with director of photography Kim Woo-hyung from The Little Drummer Girl execute a distinctive vision that flawlessly captures the screwball comedy archetype with its own rhythmic precision and stunning visuals, particularly in contrast to the picturesque autumnal backdrop. Compared to Decision to Leave, it’s more maximalist, but it still makes you think, “Wow, this is how movies should look.” Nevertheless, the meticulous framework and blocking in the numerous chaotic sequences impart a unique dark-comedic tone that evokes a classic comedy from the height of silent era cinema, albeit in stunning Technicolor.
In an exceptional leading performance, Lee Byung-hun channels his inner Chaplin.
Once again, critic A.S. Hamrah sheds perceptive light on our cinematic malaise.
The Algorithm of the Night: Film Criticism 2019-2025 by A.S. Hamrah. n + 1. 554 pages. $23
If film criticism – and film itself – survive the ongoing cultural, political, economic, and technological onslaughts they face, it will be due in part to writers like A. S. Hamrah. His latest collection (there are two, in fact; I have not yet read Last Week in End Times Cinema, but I am sure that it will also be the perfect holiday gift for the dystopic cinephile on your list) picks up where his previous book The Earth Dies Streaming left off, unleashing his savage indignation on today’s fatuous, lazy critical conversations and the vapid studio fodder that sustains it.
Not that it is all negativity. This inexhaustibly illuminating and entertaining assortment of reviews, essays, mordant Oscar roundups, and freewheeling, sui generis bagatelles first seen in such publications as n+1 (for which he is the film critic), The Baffler, the New York Review of Books, and the Criterion Collection is filled with numerous laudatory appreciations of films old and new — all of which you should watch or watch again. I was impressed with his eloquent, insightful praise for Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace (2018), his shrewd analysis of Abbas Kiarostami’s masterpiece A Taste of Cherry (1997) and its mixed critical reaction, and his reassessment of John Sayles’s neglected epic of class warfare Matewan (1987), among many others.
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Also not to be missed are Hamrah’s absurdist ventures into his personal life, many in theaters (or not in theaters, as when Covid shut them down in 2020), such as the time he observed a menacing attendee at a screening of 2010’s Joker. “It would be best to see [Joker] in a theater with a potential psychopath for that added thrill of maybe not surviving it,” he concludes. One strikingly admirable characteristic of Hamrah’s criticism is that he consciously avoids writing anything that could be manipulated by a studio into a banal blurb. You will find no “White knuckle thrill ride” or “Your heart will melt” or “A monumental cinematic experience” here.
The book does boast a bounty of blurbable bits, but they are not the kind that any publicist will put in an ad. These are laugh-out-loud takedowns of bad movies, vain filmmakers, and vapid performers. Some of my favorites among these beautiful barbs include his description of The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) as “[S]horter than Wakanda Forever by a whopping 47 minutes but still too long,” his dismissal of Jojo Rabbit (2019) as “combining Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson in the worst, cop-out ways,” and his exasperated take on Edward Berger’s 2022 remake of All Quiet on the Western Front (“What happened to the German cinema?”).
Film critic A. S. Hamrah — another inexhaustibly illuminating and entertaining assortment of writings on film. Photo: n+1 benefit.
He also displays the rare critical ability to reassess a director and give him his due. In his review of Berger’s 2024 Conclave, he admits that “Berger directs [it] like he is a totally different filmmaker than the one who made the 2022 version All Quiet on the Western Front. Unlike that film, this one is highly burnished and tightly wound.” (Watch out – close to blurb material there!)
The book ends with an apotheosis of the listicle called “Movie Stars in Bathtubs: 48 Movies and Two Incidents” in which Hamrah summarizes nine decades of cinema. It ranges from Louis Feuillade’s 1916 silent crime serial Les Vampires (“‘It is in Les Vampires that one must look for the great reality of our century’ wrote the surrealists Aragon and Breton”) to Brian De Palma’s 2002 neo-noir Femme Fatale (“There is a picture book called Movie Stars in Bathtubs, but there aren’t enough movie stars in bathtubs. De Palma’s Femme Fatale, which stars Rebecca Romijn, does much to correct that.”)
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Around the volume’s midpoint, Hamrah includes one of the two “incidents” of the title. In “1951: The first issue of Cahiers du Cinema” he celebrates the astonishing cadre of cinephiles, many of whom are depicted in Richard Linklater’s recent film Nouvelle Vague, who put out the publication that reinvented an art form. “Unlike critics today,” Hamrah points out, “these writers did not complain that they were powerless. They defended the movies they loved and excoriated the ones they hated. For them film criticism was a confrontation, its goal to change how films were viewed and how they were made.” It’s a tradition that Hamrah, who combines the personal point of view and cultural literacy of James Agee with the historical, contextualizing vision of J. Hoberman, triumphantly embraces.
Peter Keough writes about film and other topics and has contributed to numerous publications. He had been the film editor of the Boston Phoenix from 1989 to its demise in 2013 and has edited three books on film, including Kathryn Bigelow: Interviews (University Press of Mississippi, 2013) and For Kids of All Ages: The National Society of Film Critics on Children’s Movies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).
“This is one of the year’s best films, and one of the most distinctive,” said Matt Zoller Seitz in RogerEbert.com. An award winner at Cannes, the sixth feature from Brazilian writer-director Kleber Mendonça Filho is “a drama, a satire, an intriguingly laid-back espionage film, and a re-creation of a time and place,” yet that’s not all. Wagner Moura stars as a young widower on the run who returns to his home city to check on his young son in 1977, during Brazil’s brutal dictatorship. “Murder is everywhere,” a constant threat. But Mendonça is less focused on the violence than how people learn to adapt to it, and “if you’re willing to bend with the story, The Secret Agent will take you places movies rarely go.” Moura, whose character goes by the alias Marcelo, “carries the film with a star turn of suave determination,” said Richard Brody in The New Yorker.
But Mendonça has made a political thriller that’s “overflowing with sharply drawn characters,” including the elderly den mother of the safe house Marcelo moves into, a female neighbor who takes an interest in Marcelo, and a corrupt police chief. Mendonça’s wandering focus “brings history to life with bracing immediacy,” a feat all the more impressive because of his film’s “audacious twists of cinematic form,” including a hallucinatory sequence in which a severed human leg itself turns murderous. “The filmmaker’s refusal to present a traditional thriller payoff may frustrate some viewers,” said Nick Schager in The Daily Beast. Though it’s a surprising choice, “it’s in keeping with The Secret Agent’s depiction of the way in which dictatorships torment and destroy via denial.”
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‘Zootopia 2’
Directed by Jared Bush and Byron Howard (PG)
★★★
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“Sometimes more of the same isn’t a bad thing,” said Amelia Emberwing in The Wrap. The original Zootopia, after all, was a 2016 megahit that won the Oscar for an animated feature while delivering a powerful message about the dangers of discrimination. And while the long-awaited sequel doesn’t break new ground, “there’s a lot to love in Zootopia 2.” The movie returns us to a colorful city populated by anthropomorphized animals. Its animation is “bright and pop-y.” And it didn’t have to back off its core message to haul in $560 million in its first five days, the largest-ever launch for an animated film. Unfortunately, “the sweetness of the original is absent in the sequel,” said Soren Andersen in The Seattle Times.
Sure, it still features Judy the lovable bunny cop, and she’s paired again with Nick, a fox who’s learning to be less cynical, but this movie sags when the pair pause the action to analyze the state of their partnership. The rest of the time, the film “seeks to bowl the audience over with noise, velocity, and an insistent tone that winds up being kind of irritating.” But Zootopia 2 has “the kind of heart that has too long seemed to be missing from other Disney animated offerings,” said Kate Erbland in IndieWire. Not only is there real care put into developing Judy and Nick’s relationship, but this time the duo are also digging into a secret history that explains why there are no reptiles in their city, giving real weight to the film’s messaging. “That’s not to imply that Zootopia 2 isn’t funny, zippy, and highly enjoyable.” To me, it most certainly is.
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