Jennifer Lawrence Goes Feral in the Beautiful, Frustrating Die My Love

“Everybody goes a little loopy the first year,” a well-meaning, well-balanced, and seemingly well-to-do fellow mother tells Grace (Jennifer Lawrence), the unraveling mom of an infant, in Die My Love. Other moms echo the sentiment, and Grace can probably see every “well” on these women’s faces and in their well-appointed houses, which is probably why she, decidedly unwell in any available sense, rejects the attempt at gentle kinship. Beneath Grace’s willful anti-reaction – she doesn’t tell these kinds of people off so much as, say, barrel past them on her way to stripping off her clothes and jumping into a swimming pool – you can almost feel director-cowriter Lynne Ramsay’s parallel sloughing off any attempts to align her film with less confrontational works about postpartum depression, or bipolar disorder, or toxic relationships, or whatever Grace may be suffering from. The point, it sometimes seems, is that she’s suffering more.

That conviction radiates from Ramsay’s latest beguiling, frustrating film, this one based on the novel by Ariana Harwicz. Die My Love shares those qualities with many of Ramsay’s other features, which arrive at overlong intervals owed to a film industry often hostile to uncompromising women. (In the interim periods, Ramsay sometimes makes shorts, which is how her career began in the late ’90s.) That uncompromising sensibility feels intrinsic to the beauty of Die My Love, which sometimes resembles a later-period Terrence Malick movie gone feral from all that grass-twirling. (Sissy Spacek even shows up, playing Jackson’s mother.) Grace and her partner Jackson (Robert Pattinson) move into a rustic home, presumably provided to them at low or no cost to them from Jackson’s late uncle. They are somewhere in Montana. Their car’s license plate says New York, and they’re almost immediately identified as a writer (her) and a musician (him) by their (maybe mainly his) hopeful designs on their new living space – a drum kit could go here; she could write up there. This introduction is staged with Ramsay’s camera fixed at one end of the house, staring through a series of railroaded rooms as Lawrence and Pattinson move through the frame, disappearing and reappearing with off-screen exploration. It’s a clear-eyed bit of unforced exposition, though what it’s explaining doesn’t feel especially convincing – at least not if Grace and Jackson are supposed to scan as NYC bohemians making a go at domesticity.

Regardless: Soon Grace is a de facto stay-at-home mom while the dirtbaggy Jackson heads out for long hours at an unspecified job. Grace loves her baby boy, that much is clear. But how to actually fill the day in the middle of nowhere, Jackson gone and only his relatives nearby, in a home that barely looks furnished, challenges her mental health. Jackson, for his part, brings home a dog that barks constantly before getting sick, forcing Grace into a grim form of caretaking that seems almost hilariously designed to tank Lawrence’s Q rating. (She is fearless and transfixing throughout, to be clear. More on that in a moment.) Early in the film, we see Grace and Jackson circling each other, then practically hurling each other around an empty room, unencumbered by responsibility or clothing. That fire dims, though later Grace still crawls around on all fours through their grassy yard, an image that becomes a motif. Is she about to Nightbitch?

Some of the specifics are left missing, divided between evocative and confusing, sometimes in the same scene. Grace chides Jackson for working three days a week and bringing home a meager sum, but he seems to be gone more often; how else is she being left alone with the baby for such long stretches? She suspects infidelity; he insists the box of condoms in his car have been there for ages. That anyone keeps a full-on box of condoms in their glove compartment, whether for their wife or their dalliances, does not seem like especially normal human behavior. Later, Grace makes a point of telling another well-meaning fellow mom (or is it the same woman?) that she’s given up her writing; we’re meant to feel that she has discarded it in a fit of desperation and/or despair, but also, no one in this house seems to have a computer, or even a pad of paper.

Is Ramsay working in allegory, as in the Lawrence-starring Darren Aronofsky film mother!, with which this shares a nerve-rattling sensibility and, at one point, a sink unsecured from a wall? Or does she just not have that great of a feel for the everyday particulars of American life? I certainly felt the latter in We Need to Talk About Kevin, another startling treatise on the hells of motherhood, one that to me felt more informed by grotesque caricature than the movie itself was fully willing to admit. Die My Love is more delicate, despite the hurricane force of Lawrence’s intensely physical performance. Working with cinematographer Seamus McGarvey on 35mm, Ramsay captures a variety of visual tones, perhaps most strikingly the silvery darkness of predawn hours, and Lawrence works especially well within the pastoral splendor of these surroundings. They’re a perfect complement and contrast to her animal instincts.

Following her muscular Hunger Games role, Lawrence has often used her body for comedy, whether of the unstable, freewheeling David O. Russell variety or, more recently, embracing full-on slapstick in No Hard Feelings. In Die My Love, she wheels herself back around into psychological meltdown, with remnants of her comic performances – that all-fours positioning turns up in American Hustle, too – that sometimes feel like contextualization and sometimes feel like rebuke. The movie strips away so much from Grace that at times, all that’s left is Lawrence’s raw power. She almost single-handedly keeps the movie from rambling into oblivion.

Pattinson is good, too, but he suffers more from Ramsay’s avoidance of concrete details, the feeling that the movie amounts to a lot of playacting. He has more to do in the movie than Spacek or Nick Nolte, but he feels nearly as secondary as those supporting players. Despite running a full two hours, Die My Love scarcely sets aside a moment past the first 10 minutes when Grace and Jackson can demonstrate what the less fleeting form of their devotion might look like. (Even Blue Valentine found time for that before descending into its inevitable wallow.) The film often mesmerizes in the moment while feeling resistant of more sustained evocation of relationships, whether romantic, familial, or … well, in this movie there’s nothing else to even consider. (No one has the phones you’d use to call friends.) Die My Love is a powerful primal scream, only undercut by the question of whether it’s in love with the sound it’s making.

Director: Lynne Ramsay
Writers: Enda Walsh, Lynne Ramsay, Alice Birch
Stars: Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Pattinson, Sissy Spacek, Nick Nolte, LaKeith Stanfield
Release Date: Nov. 7, 2025

Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including A.V. Club, GQ, Decider, the Daily Beast, and SportsAlcohol.com, where offerings include an informal podcast. He also co-hosts the New Flesh, a podcast about horror movies, and wastes time on social media under the handle @rockmarooned.

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