Die, My Love Review: Lynne Ramsay’s Elemental Study of a Woman in Freefall

We are already inside the house when its new owners arrive. The opening shot of Die, My Love shows the ground floor of a remote home in perfect stillness, left dormant by its former owners. We watch from a fixed position (does the house see them too?) as a buoyant young couple cross the threshold, and survey how much renovation the house will need. 

He is Jackson (Robert Pattinson), a blue-collar American happy to get out of the city and closer to his family, relishing the liberty of isolation with his partner. She is Grace (Jennifer Lawrence), and despite his assurance that she can write whenever she wants and they can play music as loud as possible, the unwavering, distant eye of the camera is unnervingly aligned with the walls and ceilings of the house, casting doubt on their prospects. Over the next two hours, director Lynne Ramsay’s camera will tilt and shake, the colours will contort, the images will lose focus, the cuts will be extreme. Looking back at the opening shot of an aspirational couple entering their new home, Die, My Love’s initial stillness feels ominous.

Ramsay does not make films about people who easily triumph over their darkest, most self-destructive moments. Eight years after the premiere of her minimalist, lacerating neo-noir You Were Never Really Here, the Ratcatcher and Morvern Callar director has made another film where unmooring yourself from relationships and utterly obliterating yourself are dangerously twinned concepts. Quickly, Grace and Jackson are playing music loud, having passionate sex on the floor and making good on the bohemian promise of their isolated home, which Jackson inherited after a death in the family. (Sissy Spacek plays Jackson’s widowed mother, Pam, who suffers from disturbed sleep and imposes on Grace more than she realises.)

Soon, Grace has given birth to a son – and, as if her senses have heightened against her will, she begins to feel poisoned by her environment, beginning a long descent into depressive psychosis. Her husband, played by Pattinson with familiar high-pitched erraticism, is a lousy lover and a suboptimal co-parent – so much so, perhaps, that the script (written by Ramsay with Enda Walsh and Alice Birch) strains credulity for how incompetent, selfish and childish a partner can be. It’s an issue that touches on one of Die, My Love’s biggest flaws: that Ramsay’s film expresses its feminist themes with a degree of obviousness that can make scenes feel as untethered as the characters. Whenever Ramsay lets her two leads prowl on floors and through long grass, growling like jungle cats, the characters feel like they’re pushing away from clarity into actor antics during rehearsal – a degree of discipline from Ramsay’s older work is missing.

Based on the book by Argentine author Ariana Harwicz, Die, My Love’s story could generously be called ‘elemental’ or, less favourably, deemed ‘familiar’. But the ingenuity of Ramsay’s blistering drama lies in the volatile, magnetic connection between her camera (led by cinematographer Seamus McGarvey) and Lawrence, whose dry, cutting comedic skills have never felt more cruel and rebellious, as Grace feels herself transform into a living domestic obelisk. Feeling undesirable as their relationship begins to stagnate, she lashes out at younger women she doesn’t know, imagines her husband cheating on her with voices on his end of the phone, and imagines making a pass at a married man in front of his family. Lawrence ably, violently depicts the contradiction of Grace’s mental collapse: she is both petrified, stuck to the same, heavy spot, and driven by a real, burning impulse to hurl herself into unknown, transcendent danger.

Some of the film’s imagery has an aggressively constructed quality, but the texture of Die, My Love does a lot to make up for the tortured symbolism. The digitally shot exteriors, with eerie day-for-night light and colours corrected to sickly blues and greens, correct the shots of plain Montana farmland to some kind of infected wasteland where the air is never clean, the flies never stop buzzing, and our eyes are always strained. A struggling Grace (and in one memorable scene, Pam) roams these landscapes in an attempt to escape the resentful walls closing in on her; the shots are so strikingly composed it seems a fair trade-off when Ramsay treats us to some ropey CGI later in the film. Die, My Love is practically bursting at the seams, if not with originality, then intensity. With an aflame Lawrence in its crosshairs, it casts a nauseating, hypnotic spell, plumbing the power of its domestic imprisonment story to the deepest depths.