Lynne Ramsay returns to parenthood themes with her fifth feature film, but zeroes in on motherhood and post-partum difficulties with a new specificity for her work. Once again, she captures an underlying dread and low hum of anxiety, perhaps with less sharpness than her previous features. However, Ramsay’s visions of terrible beauty and fraying selves, coupled with an intensely committed performance from Jennifer Lawrence, are as captivating as ever.
DIE MY LOVE, based on a 2012 novel set in France, chronicles the experience of Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) in becoming a mother following her semi-rural relocation from New York City with her partner, Jackson (Robert Pattinson). In the wake of her son’s birth, she begins to feel isolated and increasingly mentally distressed, her behaviour appearing increasingly erratic to those around her.
Lynne Ramsay’s work has always been captivating but challenging to watch, often exploring themes of family, guilt and grief. The effect on children of adult dysfunction or betrayal runs through her short films, especially GASMAN, a 1998 Cannes Jury Prize winner, which presents children confronting the knowledge that their father has another family. The opening vignette of SMALL DEATHS also visually explores the role of distant fathers. WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN examines both sides of the mother-son dynamic. DIE MY LOVE extends the spectrum of Ramsay’s work by focusing squarely on Grace, dissecting a post-partum mindset in a manner that is tonally crystal clear while wading through appropriately muddy mental waters around the experience of motherhood and her death of romantic love, desire, creativity, and expression.
There is no bedding in period during DIE MY LOVE, which opens with the couple relocating to a tumbledown house with a rat upstairs before portraying them having sex accompanied by deafeningly loud non-diegetic music. Flashing forward to when Grace crawls, knife in hand, towards her son, in a feline manner, through the grass outside the house, swiftly establishes an uncomfortable dynamic. Although that incident ends largely benignly, it sets the film’s tonal baseline.
As ever, Ramsay displays an uncanny ability to produce beautiful but complex imagery. Grace, a writer, watches as breast milk, dripping from her breast after a night feeding, mixes with ink in the middle of the night, visually signifying how her new role has diluted or superseded her old one. As Grace’s boredom, exhaustion, and loneliness build, the film reflects this in formal, structural ways. The passage of time is not always clear, and Ramsay weaves in sequences which may be dreams, musings, or delusions on Grace’s part, and exemplify the growing delirium that can come with new parenthood. Several sequences have the look of being shot day-for-night and have a resulting eerie quality that blends well with Grace’s fluctuating mental state.
“There is not just the proverbial Chekhov’s gun, but a full-blown Chekhov’s Cabinet of Concerns: shotguns, knives, ill-advised car rides, bloodied vehicles, trashed rooms, broken glass, and confrontational conversations. Grace never quite explodes, and nor does Ramsay’s film, but both are at the end of their tether.”
Although Grace may fluctuate, DIE MY LOVE maintains a persistent bass note of dread and anxiety. That atmosphere is less oppressive than YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE, but if her previous feature was a feature-length panic attack, DIE MY LOVE recreates the low-level but growing anxiety Grace seems to experience. There is not just the proverbial Chekhov’s gun, but a full-blown Chekhov’s Cabinet of Concerns: shotguns, knives, ill-advised car rides, bloodied vehicles, trashed rooms, broken glass, and confrontational conversations. Grace never quite explodes, and nor does Ramsay’s film, but both are at the end of their tether. No wonder Grace declares, “I’m always worried about the baby”.
Jennifer Lawrence’s performance as Grace anchors the film, and her delivery of what might pass for ‘lighter’ moments grounds it in relatability even as it descends into another Ramsay fever dream. Her emotional clarity makes Grace’s boredom, sexual frustration, maternal instincts, and acerbic wit feel like part of one character. Her performance sits well alongside Pattinson’s Jackson, with the film heartbreakingly showing their relationship’s slow degradation from loud passion in the opening reel to exasperation and walking on eggshells. As much as the film deals with post-partum depression, it also addresses the transformation of other relationships, especially romantic ones.
“…DIE MY LOVE is in fascinating conversation with Ramsay’s other work. In] particular, WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN.”
In this respect, DIE MY LOVE is in fascinating conversation with Ramsay’s other work, and the director herself is on the record as initially hesitating to adapt the work, suggested to her by Lawrence, given the thematic overlap with, in particular, WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN. However, even if the final work shares some overarching similarities, the creative path is somewhat different. Of many ideas in WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN, one theme’s basis is in moral ambiguity: is Eva’s demeanour as a mother in any way to blame for Kevin’s nature, or is it a response to something innate in her son? Contrastingly, DIE MY LOVE never questions Grace’s devotion to her son – “I don’t have a problem attaching to my son, it’s everything else that’s fucked” – and rarely focuses on any apparent effect on the child of the deterioration of the parental relationship and Grace’s stability.
The expressionistic mode in which Ramsay’s film exists also makes a fascinating comparison with Marielle Heller’s NIGHTBITCH, which takes a more magical realist, body-horror-influenced approach to depicting new motherhood. Both films also have, to differing extents, streaks of dark comedy (burying a pet in Ramsay’s film while ‘Apples and Bananas’ cheerily zips along in the background is deliciously bleak), but DIE MY LOVE has confidence in its tone that NIGHTBITCH does not.
“Nevertheless, DIE MY LOVE is not a flawless or superlative entry in Ramsay’s filmography. In presenting the array of unsettling Chekhovian devices, some are inevitably poorly served.”
Nevertheless, DIE MY LOVE is not a flawless or superlative entry in Ramsay’s filmography. In presenting the array of unsettling Chekhovian devices, some are inevitably poorly served. In particular, the depiction of Grace engaging in extramarital sex with a motorcyclist who regularly and ominously cruises past their home is frustratingly opaque. LaKeith Stanfield portrays said motorcyclist, and it’s a tremendous waste to use his talent so fleetingly and ephemerally. The level of male incompetence and obliviousness with which Pattinson’s Jackson is written also stretches credulity at points, and inevitably lessens the impact of his character flaws in Grace’s story. Inorganic, obvious CGI also mars the film’s symbolic crescendo.
DIE MY LOVE is unlikely to be considered the pinnacle of Ramsay’s career. Still, it shows an ability to retain a stylistic approach that can be redeployed and used to tread similar ground without seeming repetitive. Even when revisiting themes, the intense clarity of vision ensures Ramsay’s work continues to feel fresh and ominously vibrant.