Lawrence plays spiraling new mother in ‘Die My Love’

Cinema | November 12th, 2025

By Greg Carlson

Scottish moviemaker Lynne Ramsay adds the fifth feature to her filmography with “Die My Love,” an adaptation of Argentine writer Ariana Harwicz’s 2012 novel. Co-written by Ramsay, Enda Walsh and Alice Birch, the movie eavesdrops on the unraveling of a young woman struggling to adjust to life following the acquisition of a new husband, a new home and a new baby. Jennifer Lawrence, in an expectedly committed performance, plays the tellingly named Grace, whose crushing loneliness and palpable discontent mark every minute of the film’s two hours. Robert Pattinson is Grace’s husband Jackson. Sissy Spacek, LaKeith Stanfield and Nick Nolte appear in smaller supporting roles.

Since her brilliant 1999 debut “Ratcatcher,” Ramsay has demonstrated a remarkable gift for visual storytelling. “Ratcatcher” remains Ramsay’s only original screenplay to date. All four of her subsequent films have been based on books. Ramsay ditches Harwicz’s first-person narration, resisting any temptation to integrate voiceover that might have offered different access to Grace’s experiences or a more intimate and subjective point of view. Not everyone will respond favorably to Ramsay’s rather fearless allegiance to this arm’s-length portrait of her protagonist’s misery. In the director’s stylebook, showing and not telling is taken to the extreme, even to the Bressonian extent that an abundance of scènes nécessaires/scènes à faire are withheld.

For those who choose to tune in to the wavelength on which Lawrence and Ramsay operate, “Die My Love” can yield some spectacular epiphanies. It is certainly fair to claim that the raw clay from which this tale is sculpted takes the shape of a particular kind of hopelessness and terror linked to postpartum depression/postpartum psychosis. But that does not mean the movie is strictly about that phenomenon. “Die My Love” fights against reductive readings at each step, investing in the routines and repetitions described by Harwicz as opposed to a more conventional movie-melodrama rendering. Jumps in time also contribute to the feeling of disorientation.

Postpartum depression has been the subject of fiction and documentary, from the bleak comedy of Jason Reitman’s “Tully” to controversial takes like Amy Koppelman’s “A Mouthful of Air” and the advocacy of Jamielyn Lippman’s “When the Bough Breaks.” The best companion piece to “Die My Love,” however, is Elizabeth Sankey’s essay film “Witches,” a bracing and innovative feminist argument that makes an intriguing connection between what I originally described as “centuries of cultural expectations revolving around motherhood [that] have taken an unfair toll on women” and the iconography and mythology of witchcraft. Side by side, “Witches” and “Die My Love” complement one another.

In his negative review, Richard Brody takes Ramsay to task, writing that “The movie both sensationalizes those [postpartum depression] dangers and subordinates them to a general, social-existential vision of women’s frustrations and subjugations in marriage.” I would argue that Ramsay knows exactly what she’s doing, even if the result doesn’t aim to please. While Brody laments the absence of any scene in which Grace’s baby is placed in genuine danger — he refers to the newborn as “the implausible eye of the storm” — I think the director’s choice in this regard is inspired. The dread and anxiety we conjure from the steady thud of Grace’s actions are on point.

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