“Fearless” is an adjective that gets thrown around a lot when people talk about screen performances. “Brave,” “unflinching,” “bold,” “gutsy” — these descriptives get their fair share of play as well. What Jennifer Lawrence is doing in Die, My Love, Lynne Ramsay’s adaptation of Ariana Harwicz’s novel about a new mother slowly losing her mind, certainly ticks every one of those boxes.
But the main word that comes to mind when you watch the star embrace an ever-enveloping madness is “free.” It’s not just that Lawrence sits perched on a shelf in an open fridge, spitting beer out of her mouth like a fountain. Or that she prowls around on all fours, sniffing at her partner like a panther in heat. Or even that she idly stabs the ground with a butcher knife, as her other hand slides down her pants. It’s more that you’re witnessing the sort of in-the-zone flow that’s normally associated with jazz soloists and pro athletes. Lawrence is liberated from anything resembling propriety or self-consciousness here. She’s 100-percent committed to embodying a woman who’s no longer on the verge of a nervous breakdown, but deep into one already in progress.
There’s a strong possibility the above paragraph piqued your curiosity enough to seek out this portrait of a postpartum depression metastasizing into something psychically catastrophic. Which, in plain terms: you should. We also wouldn’t blame anyone who immediately skimmed over the description of the Oscar-winning actor going full throttle into such dark, squirmy places and thought, no thank you. This is a movie designed to repulse as much attract, and one in which its sheer messiness, its chaos-Muppet energy and its mania gets you uncomfortably close to its unraveling main character’s mindset. Ramsay has often described herself as an experimental filmmaker, and the Scottish director who gave the world such raw, uncompromising works as Morvern Callar (2002), We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011), and You Were Never Really Here (2017) — one of the few revenge thrillers to really go there in terms of the toll vengeance extracts — hasn’t moved to the center or mellowed with age. Lawrence purposefully sought out Ramsay to adapt the book after securing the rights, with the hopes that her collaborator would both push her out of comfort zones and leave the story’s rough edges intact. Mission accomplished on both fronts.
One viewer’s feature is another’s bug, naturally, and Die, My Love isn’t trying to convert anyone. It simply demands you ride shotgun as Grace — ironic-name alert! — finds herself losing the ability to cope, or get the fuck out of the speeding-off-the-cliff car. Grace is one half of a couple that initially seems, for lack of a better word, happy. You can tell her husband, Jackson, is still in his thirtysomething manchild phase; as they move into his late uncle’s house in rural Montana, one of the first things he notes is a perfect space to put his drum kit. The fact that he’s portrayed by Robert Pattinson adds an element of equal star power when paired against Lawrence, and they both seem to connect and collide nicely with each other as scene partners. But wisely, he plays Jackson numbingly straight. This husband is still the kind of clueless dude who’ll both fail to notice his wife’s problems and bring a dog home with the expectation she’ll handle the barking disruptor’s fulltime care as well. But after years of going after weirdo roles that would help him shed Twilight-heartthrob status, Pattinson pivots again by channeling his inner normie. All the better to emphasize Lawrence creating the sensation that someone’s grip on reality getting mighty slippery.
To be fair, Ramsay gives hints early on that we’ve not entered domestic paradise by framing Grace within a series of doorframes as she enters her new home. No matter where this recently displaced woman wanders while checking the place out, she’s boxed in. After giving birth to her daughter, Grace feels even more out of sorts and isolated. Jackson is traveling for work a lot. He has family in the area, notably his widowed mother (Sissy Spacek, perfectly cast), who lend some support. But the postpartum depression that overtakes this first-time mom feels like more than what some casually dismiss as “the Mommy blues.” Because the movie plays fast and loose with time frames and a sense of linear, A-to-B progression, it’s not like you’re seeing tiny chips in the foundation that eventually lead to the walls crumbling down. It’s more that key bricks are there one second, gone the next, and Grace is suddenly, desperately moving the rubble around in search of some kind of salvation.
Disorientation and disassociation are major components of Die, My Love, and in steadier hands, this might have been more of a tidy cautionary tale: It truly does take a village, etc. Steady hands is not what this story needs, however, and definitely not what it gets. It wants you to question whether the mysterious, possibly menacing and definitely hot motorcyclist played by Lakeith Stanfield is a figment of Grace’s erotic imagination in overdrive or just a real local dad. It hopes you wonder whether a forest fire is an expressionist flourish or a real natural disaster. The film needs you to be unstable on issues of fact or fiction, so that you understand what Grace is going through in the most intimate of ways. Movies are supposed to be machines of empathy. This one’s closer to immersion therapy for phobias around motherhood, mental health and emotional maelstroms that refuse to tamed or contained.
And the film wants you to appreciate how Lawrence understands all of this, throws vanity and ego to the four winds, and leans in to the bad, the worse, and the truly ugly of it all. This is not Oscarbait posturing she’s presenting us with here, or someone trying back-channel posterity via performative punk-rock bad behavior. This is an artist seeing a challenge and rising to meet it on its own boundary-hopping, ungainly, unruly terms. Even those who think Die, My Love courts indulgence and incoherence to its own detriment — there are times when the movie itself threatens to fall apart and blow up the devices projecting it as collateral damage — will gape in awe at how Lawrence makes you feel this person coming apart at the seams. This mother makes what the star did in the equally provocative Mother seem like child’s play. She’s completely unhinged and loving it. If only every actor could find the chance to to exercise such go-for-broke freedom.
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