Almost 15 years after the school shooter drama We Need to Talk About Kevin, Lynne Ramsey has made another excellent movie about a character’s slow-motion crash-out, and a loved one having no idea how to stop it. This time, it’s Die My Love, a movie about a mother (Jennifer Lawrence) slowly losing her mind, amid new motherhood, a collapsing marriage (Robert Pattinson as the husband), relatives who don’t understand her, and having to live in a ramshackle house in the middle of Montana, when she’s used to being a writer in New York.
Lawrence’s character, Grace, gets more and more feral, in a way that combines rage, frustration, and horniness. Eventually, there flashbacks that clarify things. This is career-best work from Lawrence.
It’s a performance full of extreme physicality, and Lawrence brings her A-game. It’s refreshing to see her working with a great director, and not with David O. Russell. And while she may be having a spiraling mental health crisis, she still looks really good. A lot of reviews have called Die My Love a “dark comedy,” but there’s a lot more “dark” here than “comedy.”
The film was adapted from the novel by Ariana Harwicz. The story goes that Martin Scorsese read the novel five years ago in a book club and sent it to Lawrence, suggesting she star in it; Scorsese’s credited as a producer. Scorsese has never directed Lawrence, although she did star in the knockoff movie American Hustle; Ramsey is the right director for this material. It’s her first film in seven years, since You Were Never Really Here, but up there with her best work, like Kevin, and Morvern Callar.
If you though Die My Love was going to be an earnest issue drama about postpartum depression or other mental illness, the kind that has a phone number, website, and call to action at the end, that’s not what it is. Nor does it stake out any particular position in the current-day gender wars—this isn’t a film about the scourge of crazy wives, worthless and unhelpful husbands.
Between this and Rose Byrne in Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, it’s a great season for performances about mothers slowly losing their minds. Both movies have shocking moments involving dead animals. I’d suggest the two play on a double bill, but that’d be a punishing four hours at the movies.
The Amy Adams version last year, Nightbitch, didn’t have the juice. In 2017, Lawrence starred in Darren Aronofsky’s Mother!, also as a spiraling young mother who’s a writer and lives in an old country house, although Die My Love is much more grounded. I liked the film’s use of music, including a song by the children’s entertainer Raffi, which illustrates the way kids' music can be an unsettling soundtrack to family life. There’s also a perfect John Prine needle drop.
Jennifer Lawrence is one of those actresses whom a lot of people decided they hated for no good reason, she did or didn’t talk about politics enough, or because she wasn’t deferential enough to the nerds back when she was starring in X-Men movies. I remember reading this Buzzfeed story in 2023, with the headline “Public Scrutiny Destroyed Jennifer Lawrence. Now She Wants To Win Us Back,” and still not able to ascertain what she did wrong. She’s given a series of interviews in recent weeks, in which she’s apologized for all that. I’m glad to see her doing great work again.