Director Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love opens with the tranquil sounds of insects chirping, birdsong, and gentle rustling. Fading from black, a couple looks around their new home. The young woman, Grace (Jennifer Lawrence), appears less enamored with the property than her husband, Jackson (Robert Pattinson) does.
Sensing she’s unsure about leaving the city, he reminds her that here might not be New York, but it’ll be theirs. He tells Grace, “You can write all day to nothing but the bird’s singing.”
Ramsay and her co-writers, Enda Walsh and Alice Birch, superimpose the American Dream onto Grace and Jackson. We assume that their New York home is a rental property, whereas out here, near where Jackson grew up, they have a chance to own their own slice. Something else, however, stirs beneath this portrayal of a couple building their dream life, because Ramsay, Walsh, and Birch are orchestrating the proverbial calm before the storm.
Fast-paced rock music shatters the quiet, but it’s not only musically that Ramsay assaults our senses. A hyperactive montage reveals the transformation of demure Grace and Jackson. They ravenously claw at one another on the kitchen floor like animals. They dance and drink wildly, like two gross and horny teenagers celebrating being free to do whatever their feral hearts desire. Ramsay and her editor, Toni Froschhammer, splice in shots of the forest burning. By the time the film’s title appears onscreen, we’re left to catch our breath after this audiovisual storm.
We might think we are set to experience a filmmaking tour de force, but hidden in Die My Love’s opening is a warning to temper any such expectations. The image of burning trees is a metaphor for the postnatal depression that will afflict Grace. Its timing is no coincidence, because in the montage sequence, Grace is pregnant, and afterward, she has already given birth.
The first scene, post-title, is a striking one in which Grace approaches the house’s veranda, where Jackson watches over the baby. She cuts the top of the tall grass with a knife and lowers herself to the ground. Crawling out of sight, she spies on her husband and child, and for a moment, she resembles a slithery predator observing her prey.
The ravenous sex is the spark for a fire that will engulf not only Grace’s mind, but hers and Jackson’s world. Instead of fearing this fire, they dance around it, transforming, whether they know it or not. That sweet couple is gone up in flames, and what’s left in the ashes is something uglier. The couple, whose rough edges might still illicit our sympathy and interest, have condemned hopes and dreams to a ragged fate.
In all of this, we see Ramsay, Walsh, and Birch effectively create a juxtaposition between a calm and tempered order and chaotic turbulence. It’s all fitting because Die My Love is about destruction and the tearing down of things. Sadly, however, Ramsay, Walsh, and Birch are unable to spare their film from the same fate.
The juxtaposition that Ramsay and her co-writers hit upon in the beginning quickly spirals out of their control. Die My Love’s boisterous, stylized montage sequence undermines Jackson’s ability to act as a counterpoint to Grace’s emotional volatility and erratic behavior. The filmmakers attempt to have him play this part by returning him to a more meek and considered version of himself.
However, the vivid memories of him mimicking a feral animal during sex and drinking beer while watching the baby fold him into Grace’s dysfunction. This is only complicated by the struggle or unwillingness to flesh out either character.
Ramsay, Walsh, and Birch are clearly trying to enter Grace’s chaotic mind, but to what purpose? Die My Love neglects to move beyond a surface-level exploration of the characters and the subject of postnatal depression. All we can discern is the film’s morbid curiosity, which disavows the individual’s experience of trying to understand their mental and emotional health. It’s even unclear whether the filmmakers like or care about Grace and Jackson. Whether aware of it or not, they are lost in their own morbid curiosity and what could be described as not merely a dislike, but a contempt for their characters.
This is unfortunate because by failing to genuinely understand the severity of the experience of either the individual or their family, Die My Love is reduced to an emotionally exploitative work. It’s not until around 95 minutes into the story that Grace receives any help. This is after a series of incidents, when she crashes through the glass pane of a door, terrifying Jackson, or has an embarrassing moment on the dance floor at a wedding.
Lawrence may be offered the chance to deliver a powerful performance, but these shortcomings are difficult to ignore, and for those sensitive to mental health issues, they are likely to be provocative. Thankfully, Lawrence, in her performance of a woman whose mind has turned against her, manages to convey with genuine power the pain and ugliness of mental health struggles, emotionally and physically.
One of the film’s strengths is that Ramsay, Walsh, and Birch are not driven to create a contained narrative that ends with a tidy resolution. Sadly, even this is undermined when Die My Love is a distracted mess that prioritizes style over substance, as evident in the catchy renditions of songs like Toni Basil’s “Hey, Mickey!” and Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart”.
The problem is that the visual accompaniment to “Hey, Mickey!”, for example, becomes an overly long sequence of Grace acting erratic, with an irritating music video-like vibe. Like the early montage sequence, Die My Love is burdened with impulsive and indulgent choices that are made on a whim, without the foresight to appreciate how they might affect the film’s integrity.
The lingering question is what’s left after these stylistic flourishes have faded away? The honest truth is, not much. Die My Love appears to be reticent to evolve on a thematic level. Even those ideas about how procreation affects the dynamics of a relationship are given superficial treatment. For instance, two threads that are never fully explored beyond being a dramatic device are 1. how Jackson’s attraction and sexual desire for Grace may have changed since she has become the mother of his child, and 2. the identity crisis Grace experiences when she becomes a mother.
Die My Love dashes any early hopes of being a potentially great film with striking audiovisual beauty. It pivots between seducing us with its messiness and churning our stomachs with contempt. For better or worse, Die My Love has the genuine strength of presence to provoke such a visceral response. This might be because the filmmakers resemble children playing at making a grown-up film or a serious arthouse film that needs to find the sweet spot between style, experimentation, and substance. Ramsay, Walsh, and Birch are off the mark but succeed in creating a film that is difficult to reckon with, let alone like.
Die My Love played in the Gala section of the 69th BFI London Film Festival. It released theatrically in the US and UK on 7 November.