‘DIE MY LOVE’: Postpartum Dread Lacks Direction

Leaving the big city for a beat-up house deep in the Montana sticks, new parents Grace (Jennifer Lawrence, frequently nude) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson, less nude) are struggling to adjust. She’s a writer; he works with his hands in coveralls. Their rural life isn’t particularly fulfilling, and neither, unfortunately, is the film. From acclaimed auteur Lynne Ramsay (We Need to Talk About Kevin, You Were Never Really Here), Die My Love is a meandering plunge into postpartum ennui that captures its characters’ slow unraveling but drags the audience along for the same dreary ride without much in the way of reward.

Lawrence plays Grace, who, ironically, struggles to find any grace in her new role as a mother. She drifts through her rustic purgatory like a freshly turned zombie. Lawrence, ever emotive—bulging sad eyes, simmering agitation, volcanic outbursts—is stuck in an existential litmus test that’s as narratively barren as the windswept Montana outlands around her. The only time she isn’t abjectly miserable is when she’s getting shwasty on cheap beers on her collapsing porch. Lawrence gives a fierce, full-body performance; unflinching and raw, even when the script leaves her mostly stranded to just explode on camera.

Pattinson is playing against type, which, at this point, has basically become his type, as Jackson, a blue-collar drifter who might be more content than he lets on to be back among his humble roots. His parents, Pam (Sissy Spacek), haunted by sleepwalking and ghosts of the past, and Harry (Nick Nolte), sliding into senility and skipping like a busted vinyl, hammer home the point: the roads out here don’t lead far. Life on the fringes, especially with a screaming infant, can make you “a little loopy.”

There’s a charged current of sexual tension, or more accurately, the absence of it that haunts this couple. Grace, in all her raw need, begs Jackson to sleep with her, grasping at remnants of a vanishing identity. Her frequent nudity isn’t erotic; it’s desperate and confrontational. Ramsay uses Lawrence’s body to underscore Grace’s liminal state. She is no longer just a lover, but not fully a mother either. Her physical exposure mirrors her psychic unraveling, highlighting the brutal dissonance between who she was and who she’s becoming. But Grace isn’t just sad. She’s terrifying. Unstable. She lashes out, destroys things, begs Jackson to kill the family dog with nothing resembling empathy. Her violence is as much internal as external, and her attempts at connection are short-circuited by an unhinged cruelty that makes her feel both feral and unreachable.

Die My Love explores the emotional wreckage new parenthood can leave in its wake, using Grace and Jackson’s slow-motion implosion as a grim meditation on postpartum disillusionment. But it loops the same bleak beats too often, never quite getting under the skin or bridging the emotional gap between its characters and the audience, well-acted though they may be.

There are some interesting musical choices, and the movie’s aesthetic is effectively unnerving. But it too often feels like we too are unraveling alongside Grace, stuck in the dreamy post-sunset nothingness, waiting for something, anything to actually happen. Ramsay shoots predominantly in a bruised grey-blue palette, the long night tones of Big Sky country, imbuing everything with a dreamy sort of dread. Her camera lingers in the liminal, catching the spaces between action, those slack stretches between major life events that, frankly, make up most of living. But cinematically, it’s a slog—a drearily paced slow burn that demands way too much patience to be able to offer much in the way of payoff.

CONCLUSION: Madness consumes a new mother in Lynne Ramsay’s latest vision of domesticity gone bad. Set in the isolated countryside, ‘Die My Love’ explores postpartum depression pushed to its breaking point and though Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson are frequently excellent, the film is ultimately little more than a thought-provoking slog.