Raw in its colour and emotions, Die My Love paints out a crash into madness and despair during post-natal depression
Jennifer Lawrence embodies the bold, the bad, and the ugly of the post-natal period in the new psychological drama, Die My Love, full of unpredictable turns and occasional missteps. Adapted from the 2012 novel by Ariana Harwicz, director Lynne Ramsay brings the story of a first-time mother Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and her partner Jackson (Robert Pattinson) onto the big screen with a colourful palette of emotions and plot twists. Rather than employing conventional storytelling, the film acts as an extensive study of the female soul in the turbulent period of early motherhood. A topic that is heavily tabooed and misconceived, yet to which Die My Love does justice.
Along with No Hard Feelings and Causeway, Die My Love is the third picture from the making of Lawrence’s production company, Excellent Cadaver, that she both produced and starred in. The backbone of her acting here is not only her undeniable range and skill for the craft, but mainly the mental strength to shoot this kind of film while being pregnant with her second child, making this performance outstanding in comparison to her recent work.
The young couple’s lust is in full bloom when we are introduced to them at the viewing of their new home. Before long, the old country house in Montana, far from any road, becomes both a mental and physical prison rather than a cozy home for Grace after she gives birth. Facing an utter social isolation and unrequited sexual desires that Jackson finds on his work trips to town, she often rests in her memories and thoughts, dissociating from reality. Grace used to be a somewhat successful writer, but she is suddenly unable to lean back on what she knew best before motherhood, and this recipe is gradually stripping her of her identity. As her mental health deteriorates, the line between what is still real and what is not becomes blurry, adding to the already poetic style of storytelling.
While it is admittedly a harrowing watch, the 119-minute picture tries to balance the sombre psychological images with its cinematography that exhibits landscape paintings full of radiant and raw colours framed in the tones of mental struggle. Another big player adding to Die My Love’s character is the sound. Apart from some good old classics, notably the intimate car drive scene, where we hear Grace and Jackson’s version of John Prine’s “In Spite of Ourselves”, there is mainly a soundscape that lurches and catches the viewer by surprise, accentuating the moods and shifts in the story.
Grace’s love for her child is indisputable, despite moments like when she’s dancing around it with a kitchen knife or when she storms out with the stroller across the fields to visit her mother-in-law (Sissy Spacek), which is what ultimately sets it apart from pictures of the same genre. Die My Love possesses the right amount of explicitness of the new mother’s inner turmoil that A Mouthful of Air lacked, and excludes the baby from the equation of possible causes, unlike in We Need To Talk About Kevin, where the mother’s struggle was partly driven by the mutual resentment between her and her child.
Known for exploring central themes of her films through the protagonists, as with grief in Morvern Callar or abuse and violence in You Were Never Really Here, Ramsay’s touch is also evident in Die My Love, given the screen time and depth awarded to Lawrence’s character. However, this explorative benevolence causes some tides in the overall flow of the storytelling that, at times, gets caught up in hopeless circles with no way out or forward. Surprisingly enough, the task of moving the story forward falls upon Jackson in his attempts to break Grace out of the distant place that she left him for. And even if he is unable to see where Grace’s behaviour is coming from, making his attempts unsuccessful, he never gives up on her or them as a family.
Die My Love articulates how women are once again left in the dark and on their own when it comes to exclusively female experiences, in this case, the trials of early motherhood. It was obvious from their sympathy that Grace’s presumable friends recognised their own agony of the post-natal experience in her, but none of them actually raised the alarm. In this sense, sympathy really is a knife, as Charli XCX wrote in her song of the same name, and for Grace’s situations it applies twice as much. The only exception is Jackson’s mother, who vocalised her concerns directly with Grace and later with her son, who eventually takes Grace to a mental health facility. But not even this act of care is enough to save Grace from running off to the burning forest, leaving the ending open to the viewer’s interpretation. Perhaps hinting that the only way out of the post-partum madness is through hell.
Die My Love premiered last year at the Cannes Film Festival and is now available on MUBI
