‘Die My Love’ Movie Review: A Descent into Madness and the Unraveling of Maternal Reality

Die My Love Movie Review

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.

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.

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.”

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 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.

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 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.

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.

Die For Me Movie Review: Final Grade

Grade: C-