Being a mother can be a fucking nightmare, and no two artists know that better than Lynne Ramsay and Jennifer Lawrence. The former directed one of the most effective forms of contraception, We Need to Talk About Kevin, where a mother is tormented by her psychopathic son, but is somehow the only one left standing in his wake. Lawrence, before taking a career hiatus, gave one of the most brutal performances of the past 10 years in Darren Aronofsky’s mother! as a personification of Mother Nature who is beaten, attacked, and burned to a crisp, right after she watches her newborn baby be ravaged by intruders. Now, the two join forces for a no-holes-barred look at how mothers are treated in the real world, with no serial killer sons or biblical metaphors. Die, My Love follows Grace, a new mother left at home to do nothing but mourn her writing career and wonder whether her husband, Jackson (Robert Pattinson), is cheating on her, as she spirals into a depression that doesn’t derive from an imbalance of hormones, but how the world has changed its view of her since having a child.
But Ramsay isn’t merely trying to show that motherhood isn’t for everyone. Grace’s mental decline may be postnatal depression, but it comes from something that goes beyond having children — not having her sexual needs met, being left on her own for hours on end with no one to talk to, and having no purpose in her life aside from her role as mother and partner. Die, My Love is Lynne Ramsay’s most stylish film to date; the director has become known for her subtle, understated thrillers that find the disturbing in the everyday, but here, Ramsay goes for it in a wild, heaving fuck you to everything that people expect from women and mothers. Anchored by a hilarious and devastating tour-de-force performance from Jennifer Lawrence, Die, My Love is immediately a defining film on the beauty and misery of motherhood.
What Is ‘Die, My Love’ About?

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The opening of Die, My Love makes it clear right away that Ramsay is doing something bigger here in terms of style. We watch as Jackson and Grace move into his late uncle’s house in the rural South, which will require some fixing up. Once they’ve gotten the lay of the land, a loud electronic guitar-heavy score bangs while the title card with a burning forest explodes across the screen. Then, a montage of Robert Pattinson and Jennifer Lawrence having animalistic sex on the wooden floor of their new home. Once they’ve had a baby, Grace still wants to play jungle, crawling through the long grass, hungry for her husband’s affection. But Jackson has grown distant and uninterested in Grace since the arrival of their baby son, and his job calls for him to be out of the house for long stretches. Grace entertains herself by keeping their baby up, masturbating, and lusting over their neighbor (LaKeith Stanfield), who constantly drives by their house on his motorcycle.
Things have changed for Grace and Jackson since having their child; Jackson is not as playful or horny, and Grace feeling more neglected by the day. Her only confidante is Jackson’s mother, Pam (an endearing Sissy Spacek), whose life still revolves around her dead husband, to whom she completely devoted herself. Grace’s mental stability continues to crack and draws the attention of Jackson’s friends and family, as Grace disappears for hours with their son, swims in pools in her underwear with their friends’ children, and trashes their bathroom. She’s like a troubled toddler when she pulls silly faces as Jackson tries to talk about their relationship, and their arguments look nothing like Marriage Story. They’re both as petty as each other, but instead of infantilizing Grace, it taps into the primal nature of what Ramsay is discussing. Grace’s basic needs are not being met, and she kicks and screams so that Jackson finally takes notice of her spiral. But nothing seems to be enough, and Grace continues to be misunderstood by everyone she was told she could trust.
Lynne Ramsay Dissects How Mothers Are Treated

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Based on the novel of the same name by Ariana Harwicz, Ramsay co-wrote the script with Enda Walsh and Alice Birch, and compared to a movie like mother!, the female perspective both behind the camera and in the writing makes for a much more full-rounded view of the nuances of motherhood. It’s not a body horror that presents pregnancy as a crippling plague, nor is it used as a metaphor for something larger. Grace is repeatedly told by fellow mothers that she needs to look after herself, there’s help for her, and people should speak about their struggles with raising children more. On the surface, it appears that Grace has tons of support, but Ramsay frames these scenes as nothing but isolating. Die, My Love gets to the complicated nature of how motherhood is, at once, an extremely universal and singular experience. The platitudes used to ease new mothers go over Grace’s head and only work to make her feel less understood.
But perhaps the most unexpected aspect of Die, My Love’s exploration is that Grace loves being a mother. She loves her son and is a much better and more present parent to him despite her mental issues. A beautifully lyrical scene of Grace walking through the forrest carrying her baby to “April Showers” (yes, from Bambi, where the mother and sole protector of the titular deer is killed while the father is off elsewhere doing who knows what), is a stunning exhibit of the peace Grace can find in the beauty of the natural world — both around her and within her. But when she’s ignored by her husband, placated by her mother-in-law, and judged by fellow mothers, it flips her experience into something much more insidious. It’s a complex and uncompromising look at how women are changed (against their will) after having children, as Grace is left wondering why she couldn’t have her old life with a child as well.

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After years of Ramsay’s gritty realism, Die, My Love is a bombastic and blustering outpouring of the director’s skills. While Die, My Love first appears to be set in the 1960s, with Lawrence’s hair and makeup and the wardrobe all suggesting mid-20th century, we see the couple calling each other on iPhones. But there’s no other indicator of what year they’re in. Ramsay builds a world that has traces of every age throughout the past century, as Grace’s mental fragility can’t be traced back to another time. What Grace is going through is timeless and recurring, as Ramsay rips away the social confines of a past time to remind us that this still happens to women everywhere, every day. It’s just ravenous to take in all that Ramsay throws in our face to make this movie as tangible, primal, and animalistic as possible. While Grace is out there acting like a three-year-old and also a caged animal who’s just been released, Ramsay maintains that close focus on her character so we, the audience, never get lost in the mayhem. Calling back to Ramsay’s early work like Morvern Callar, Die, My Love sees the director push aside tone and atmosphere for blazing visuals and tight character studies.
Jennifer Lawrence Gives One of the Best Performances of Her Career in ‘Die, My Love’

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Die, My Love marks an astounding return to the top for Jennifer Lawrence, whose time away from the spotlight has clearly allowed her to hone her craft as she enters a new stage in her career. You might think there would be similar notes in this performance to what we saw in mother! But with Ramsay’s direction, Lawrence goes into another realm far beyond what Aronofsky had her do. Lawrence and Ramsay work carefully to draw out a childlike air in Grace that never feels patronizing. The tantrums, the sullen looks out the window as she ignores Jackson, and the trashing of the bathroom are as essential to her character as her dreams to be an established writer, her insatiable appetite for sex, and her bond with her child. The scenes between her and Pattinson aren’t written to exhibit articulate dialogue on the hardship of having a partner.
They fight with vitriol dripping from their lips as they tell each to fuck off and scream into their faces. Pattinson makes Jackson into something more than a lazy father, but a man just as lost in early parenthood, unaware of the privilege he has by being able to walk away. And then there’s the secret heart of the film, Sissy Spacek. Her scenes with Lawrence are crucial in illuminating the side to Grace that has been buried by her mental decline — curiosity, kindness, and empathy. It’s a remarkable cast all around, with a limited but upsetting performance from Nick Nolte, but Lawrence is the clear standout, reveling in how messy and destructive she gets to be without making Grace feel like a one-note caricature.
Die, My Love feels like Ramsay’s way of showing how versatile she is. It’s not as hopeless and disturbing as something like We Need to Talk About Kevin, following the optimism of her last film, the desolate crime thriller, You Were Never Really Here. But what it has in common with all of her work is that it draws out the little ways humans can be so destructive to themselves and each other. Die, My Love is further proof that no one is doing it like Lynne Ramsay, whose technique and style continue to evolve, as she draws out a career-best performance from Jennifer Lawrence in a must-see thriller spectacle that turns a single woman’s experience into a brutally honest psychological epic.