FILM OF THE WEEK: Die My Love - Reviewed by Roe McDermott

After an eight-year silence following the precision brutality of You Were Never Really Here, Lynne Ramsay returns with Die My Love, a hallucinatory domestic psychodrama that oscillates between dazzling control and sensory freefall. Adapted from Ariana Harwicz’s 2012 novel with Enda Walsh and Alice Birch, the film relocates the story of maternal breakdown from the French countryside to an isolated Montana farmhouse, where new motherhood, creative suffocation, and rural loneliness fuse into a howling crisis.

Jennifer Lawrence plays Grace, a writer whose career and community have been traded for a dilapidated home and a husband, Jackson (Robert Pattinson), whose soft ineptitude curdles into something menacing. His detachment is banal and cruel - he cheats, brings home an endlessly barking dog while the baby won’t sleep, and shrugs through the mounting evidence of his wife’s collapse. Ramsay’s horror lies not in overt violence, but in the everyday male negligence that traps women inside it. Jackson’s refusal to acknowledge Grace’s unravelling becomes its own form of psychological abuse: the chilling normalcy of a man who mistakes being neglectful for being easy-going.

From its first moments, Ramsay thrusts us into Grace’s disordered perception. Seamus McGarvey’s cinematography, so lush on films like Atonement and Nocturnal Animals, drips with delirium - images warp, light leaks, and focus slips like a fever dream. The sound design lurches between glam nostalgia and eerie quiet: Bowie and Cocteau Twins crash against Peggy Lipton’s saccharine pop, underscoring Grace’s restless mind. The film’s early stretch crackles with energy, as Lawrence and Pattinson move through their house like animals, enjoying their bodies and mating rituals before tuning into predators circling prey - intimate, mistrustful, coiled.

But as Grace’s breakdown deepens, Ramsay surrenders narrative cohesion for a series of feverish fragments of violence, ritual, and surreal intrusion that feel like visions clawed from the unconscious. It’s impactful, but starting at a heightened state leaves it without much grounding or room to escalate, so the excess feels more flattening than explosive.

 Die My Love may be about madness, but it feels innately tied to the suffocating architecture of gender. Ramsay draws on the contemporary wave of “maternal unravelling” cinema - stretching from horror like Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, The Babadook, Hereditary to dramas like Tully, Nightbitch, the upcoming If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. Where the horror films externalise the pressures, anxieties and isolation of motherhood, Ramsay turns them inward, toward the structures that isolate mothers within marriage.

Like the narrator in Sarah Manguso’s recent autofiction novel Liars or in Lily Allen’s recently revealing lyrics, Grace has been moved away from friends, work, and the infrastructure of care, all to benefit her husband. Ramsay makes geography itself a trap – the town Grace and Jackson lives in has no transport, community or intellectual life. When the endless labour of childcare begins, the limits close in: social, economic and bodily. Grace has postpartum depression, maybe psychosis, but madness here also feels like a reasonable response to a structure designed to erase her sense of self.

Grace’s regression becomes a kind of resistance. She aggressively sexually propositions Jackson who continuously rejects her. Its’s implied he's having sex with other women while away for work, and Grace becomes livid at his refusal to attend to her needs while fulfilling his own with abandon. As her exhaustion and resentment curdles into defiance, she regresses, in many ways, to the behaviour of a toddler – abandoning social niceties, stripping off at polite neighbourhood gatherings to jump into the pool, trashing a bathroom and fingerpainting on the floor with dumped-out bottles of shampoo and moisturiser. In a world where men like Jackson and infants are permitted unfiltered want, her rebellion is to reclaim the same freedom - to live without repression, even if the result looks like madness.

The Montana landscape mirrors this primal pull. Its vastness hums with a dangerous, magnetic energy; the fields and forests seem to whisper promises of obliteration and rebirth. Ramsay turns nature into enemy and accomplice, an external expression of Grace’s longing to dissolve into something raw and untamed. The contrast between the rigid domestic interior and the expansive, lawless outdoors evokes a familiar double-bind: the home as a site of safety that has become a prison.

Lawrence gives an astonishing, full-bodied performance - feral, funny, frightening, at times heartbreakingly tender. Yet Ramsay’s total commitment to sensory overload occasionally stifles emotional nuance. . Grace’s identity as a writer barely registers, so her former life, ambition and intellectual or professional power remains submerged beneath the film’s emotional and visual focus, diluting our understanding of how starkly her life has transformed. Pattinson’s subtlety, meanwhile, is muffled by the film’s symbolic weight and dialogue-light writing - Jackson is less a person than an emblem of male inertia.

Die My Love is a work of extremes: hypnotic, immersive, beautiful, indulgent, underdeveloped and sometimes exasperating. Ramsay’s ambition is undeniable - she wants to capture the sound of a mind tearing itself apart - but her stylistic daring sometimes outruns her empathy. The result is a film both arresting and alienating, at once intimate and overwhelming.

It’s uncompromising, intoxicating, and a warning. If you’re in a relationship and planning to have a child, maybe don’t see it with your partner. Or do – and if you see your relationship reflected back to you onscreen, run.

Directed by Lynne Ramsay. Written by Lynne Ramsay, Enda Walsh, Alice Birch. Cinematography by Seamus McGarvey. Editing by Toni Froschhammer.
Starring Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Pattinson, LaKeith Stanfield, Sissy Spacek, Nick Nolte. 118 mins In cinemas now.

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