Lynne Ramsay’s Die, My Love is a devastating and mesmerising exploration of motherhood, mental illness, and identity. Adapted from Ariana Harwicz’s 2012 novel, the film captures the raw, disorienting experience of postpartum depression with an intensity that few filmmakers could manage. Working with co-writers Alice Birch and Enda Walsh, Ramsay has crafted a work that is both intimate and unsettling — a portrait of a woman unravelling beneath the weight of expectation.
Jennifer Lawrence delivers one of the most fearless performances of her career as Grace, a young mother living with her husband Jackson (Robert Pattinson) in rural Montana. Their home, vast and remote, quickly becomes a metaphor for Grace’s own mental unravelling — beautiful but suffocating. Jackson, often away for work, embodies a well-meaning but oblivious kind of masculinity; his inability to recognise the depth of Grace’s despair only amplifies her sense of helplessness. Ramsay observes their disintegrating marriage with her characteristic precision, allowing small moments — a look, a gesture, an unfinished sentence — to reveal the emotional distance growing between them.
Visually, the film is extraordinary. Cinematographer Seamus McGarvey saturates every frame with a kind of hyperreality. The sound design heightens this unease, blending the sounds of wind, insects, and distant machinery into a constant, unnerving hum. Ramsay has always had an exceptional ear for atmosphere, and here she uses it to place the audience directly inside Grace’s fractured consciousness.
What sets Die, My Love apart from other depictions of maternal breakdown is Ramsay’s refusal to turn Grace into a victim. Instead, the film stays grounded in her perspective — sometimes lucid, sometimes delusional, always deeply human. Grace’s attempts to reclaim her creative voice, to write and make sense of her experience, become increasingly desperate as her reality begins to fall apart. The discovery that the house once belonged to a family member who took his own life adds an eerie sense of inevitability, but Ramsay resists any easy descent into Gothic melodrama. She’s more interested in how trauma can sometimes feel suffucating.
The supporting cast is uniformly strong. Sissy Spacek brings warmth and weary compassion as Jackson’s mother, while Nick Nolte’s brief but affecting turn as her ailing husband offers a poignant counterpoint to Grace’s unraveling. LaKeith Stanfield, as a stranger who drifts in and out of Grace’s imagination, embodies the seductive pull of the unknown and unfamiliar.
By its conclusion, Die, My Love refuses neat resolution or redemption. Instead, Ramsay leaves us in the ambiguity of Grace’s experience — where love, rage, and despair intertwine. It’s a film that asks for patience and empathy, and rewards both. Brutal, beautiful, and profoundly affecting, Die, My Love confirms Ramsay once again as one of the most fearless filmmakers working today.
