‘Die My Love’: A Mood Piece That’s Cyclical, Frustrating And Occasionally Brilliant

Die My Love is a difficult watch. Director Lynne Ramsey has never exactly shied away from uncomfortable material, but her latest work starring Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson tackles a harrowing sensation rarely depicted with grace on screen: post-partum depression.

However, the difficulty of watching Die My Love does not arise from its weighty themes, but rather its lack of specificity in delving into them. Despite a committed troupe of performers and filmmaking that’s wonderful to look at, the characters of  Ramsey’s story are more conceptual abstractions rather than well-defined people, undermining the full potential of navigating this condition on screen.

Conceptually, Die My Love makes perfect sense. Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) begins to lose her grip on reality after giving birth to her child, thanks to her neglectful and sexually withdrawn husband Jackson (Robert Pattinson) and a poor support network. Only once things have gotten seriously dire do the people around Grace take notice; a pointed reflection of our own reality.

The strongest aspect of Ramsey’s film is the fact that she effectively uses cinematic techniques to convey Grace’s mental spiralling. Die My Love creates a tapestry of uncomfortable noises and visuals that centres the viewer firmly in Grace’s perspective, and can often make you feel like you’re also going mad.

Die My Love‘s abstraction hinders its characters

However, this effective technique is hindered by the fact that the film does not set a solid baseline of reality to spiral from. For me, there was simply not enough time spent exploring what Grace and Jackson’s lives were like before having a child to make her total disconnection from reality feel like it was actually happening to a real person.

The characters in Die My Love, particularly Grace, just felt too abstractly defined for a film tackling such a heavy topic. A sense of weight is brought back with Jennifer Lawrence’s performance, which is extremely raw and committed in a way that’s stunningly uncomfortable to watch.

Lawrence’s sense of emotional depth carries Die My Love as it endlessly spirals in on itself; a valid creative choice once again undermined by the previously weakly defined lines of the movie’s characters. Pattinson is also good, but can feel a little one-note given the cyclical nature of the material.

It’s not that I expected Die My Love to be a particularly fun film, nor did I want it to be. I feel its cyclical, often frustrating sensibilities are the point: Ramsey is trying to capture here what it feels like to be lost in the depths of post-partum depression, and she often does succeed with brilliantly loose, chaotic filmmaking.

Yet despite life being breathed into them by Lawrence and Pattinson, the characters at the heart of the film’s story simply don’t feel real enough to truly feel their emotions. As such, Die My Love is an almost entirely abstract composition: a fine endeavour, but one that I personally felt could’ve used a dose of reality as a counterbalance.

★★★

Die My Love is in cinemas now.