It’s hard to believe that the days of Jennifer Lawrence playing teenagers on the brink of adulthood are now a more bygone entity than the days she’s spent playing adults on the verge of… something, whether it’s a psychological break, a moral reckoning, or internal suffering that defies logic. A not-so-fun fact: The latter roles, which have tended to see Lawrence emotionally shapeshift into remarkably complex and hot-blooded women with scores to settle and life to finally live, have been crafted for her, almost exclusively, by men.
Katniss Everdeen may have been written by Suzanne Collins, but Francis Lawrence (who directed the three sequel films to The Hunger Games, which was directed by Gary Ross) turned her into a silver screen sensation. The star’s three (unfortunate) collaborations with David O. Russell – Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle, and Joy – are intermittently carried by her energy, which courses through the center of each film regardless of the varying size of their ensembles. Darren Aronofsky wrote the most ambitious part she ever took with 2017’s mother!; her most successful non-Hunger Games projects have been X-Men films and Passengers, the former being routinely boring and the latter being impressively appalling. The “comeback” portion of her career – a mislabeled stage that began with 2021’s Don’t Look Up after a two-year break from acting, God forbid – has been headlined by her turn in Adam McKay’s political satire and her comedy breakout in Gene Stupnitsky’s No Hard Feelings. There’s a pattern here.
To be clear, this tendency is not Lawrence’s fault. Sure, her choice to continue returning to sets ruled by the heavy hand of O. Russell is worthy of interrogation, but the fact that some of her best performances – often woman-directed – have gone under the radar with everyday moviegoers has far less to do with her choices than it does with viewer biases and the imbalanced treatment that female directors receive in the industry. Her true breakout, years before Katniss ever fired a bow and arrow, came in Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone. Towards the onset of her critical resurgence at the top of the 2020s came Lila Neugebauer’s Causeway, a criminally underseen drama in which Lawrence plays a veteran with a traumatic brain injury and delivers some of the best work of her career. Now comes Die My Love, Lynne Ramsay’s first picture since 2018’s You Were Never Really Here, that stars Lawrence as – you guessed it – a woman undergoing a severe psychological breakdown in the aftermath of giving birth to her first child. It’s a natural next stage in her professional evolution; it demands to be seen, if not for the purpose of pure enjoyment.
Written by Ramsay, Enda Walsh, and Alice Birch and based on the 2012 novel of the same name by Ariana Harwicz, there’s a relentlessness to the film that suits Lawrence’s acting style in a manner that almost serves as an inverse to what she was doing in Neugebauer’s film, an exhibition that was more reliant on fits and starts of dramatics than Ramsay’s film. Die My Love is, by definition, a showcase, one that is often scattered if not outright messy, yet nimbly evades forcing any of its actors to clean things up with one fell swoop of heroics. Lawrence’s Grace is in a relationship with Robert Pattinson’s Jackson, and the film begins with the partners moving from New York City to Jackson’s rural hometown in Montana, yet while this shift in lifestyle may present itself as a quieter existence, Grace has no intention of remaining dormant. The couple is ferociously sexual, a trait we see in graphic detail in Ramsay’s prologue after they tour the shabby rural dwelling they’ll soon call home. They crawl upon the floors (in desperate need of sanding and staining) like animals on the prowl before jumping one another in the nude, a scene that turns out to be the perfect appetizer for what Ramsay and especially Lawrence have to offer over the ensuing two hours.
For an actor whose career has lived in the spotlight since it began damn near two decades ago, Die My Love is a fascinating announcement for Lawrence, not of what she can do, but what she wants to be doing. Which is not to say that the now-35-year-old is clamoring to play mothers and mothers alone, but that her instincts have led her to starring (and, notably, producing) in a film that depicts motherhood in a more complex manner than most other projects that loosely proclaim to tackle postpartum depression as one of their principal themes.
The most fascinating thing about Ramsay’s movie, in fact, is that it’s far less about the relationship between a mother and child after a birth and more about what happens to the woman who gave birth once that identifying characteristic has turned from “expectant mother” to “mother.” Grace regularly reaffirms to those around her that her son is the best thing to ever happen to her, and that she loves him dearly; we even see that this is the case in the scenes they share. Her chaotic unraveling is more so a byproduct of her feeling rejected by her baby’s father, especially in the bedroom (or wherever else sex could feasibly be had), and the fact that she feels stripped of her individuality and sense of self now that the bump is gone and the baby is out in the world. She is no longer Grace: She is Grace, the mother. Lawrence eschews the typical craze that many similar roles become defined by as her “erraticism” begins to veer into a territory more closely rooted to mania. That it’s so believable is the most startling – or startlingly impressive – part. In other words: Nightbitch, this is not.
Ramsay’s narrative is a rockier subject than the performances she directs, not to mention the poetic filmmaking she and her cinematographer Seamus McGarvey enter into a pantheon of colorful, impassioned imagemaking that stands apart from many of the year’s more complete works. There’s an element of distraction to the story, almost as though there was a passing fear of Grace’s antics becoming too much to be the primary focal point of a 118-minute drama that led Ramsay and co. down a few stray paths that fit not in the Die My Love they ultimately made. LaKeith Stanfield appears in a cameo-adjacent role as a motorcyclist with whom Grace becomes erotically obsessed, and though it’s worthwhile to see our lead character experiencing the sexual freedom she longs to achieve with the man she’s spending her life with, the scenes that Lawrence and Stanfield share feel like they’ve been pulled out of an entirely different, more serene film.
Of course, the point is in plain sight: Grace only feels seen when she is literally being seen by this newfound object of attraction. But it disturbs the lack of peace that Ramsay had been cultivating prior, something that Sissy Spacek and Nick Nolte’s few scenes in the film soothe like a tonic rather than a blast of lemon juice to the eye. The legends play Jackson’s mother and father, respectively, and are eyes that see Grace for the person she is, as opposed to the person she’s become via childbirth. As this turbulent ship’s captain, Lawrence certainly gets us on that wavelength on her own, though it’s nice to see her have a little help from her in-laws, especially when everyone else in the movie only seems to want to ask her about how much sleep she’s getting and whether or not her little tyke is “latching” yet. Perhaps he is, or maybe he isn’t. That Ramsay and her star are more interested in how Grace can rediscover her individuality while managing (or mismanaging) motherhood all the while matters far more than who helps her get there.
Die My Love is currently playing exclusively in theaters courtesy of Mubi.
Die My Love is, by definition, a showcase, one that is often scattered if not outright messy, yet nimbly evades forcing any of its actors to clean things up with one fell swoop of heroics.
Will Bjarnar is a writer, critic, and video editor based in New York City. Originally from Upstate New York, and thus a member of the Greater Western New York Film Critics Association and a long-suffering Buffalo Bills fan, Will first became interested in movies when he discovered IMDb at a young age; with its help, he became a voracious list maker, poster lover, and trailer consumer. He has since turned that passion into a professional pursuit, writing for the film and entertainment sites Next Best Picture, InSession Film, Big Picture Big Sound, Film Inquiry, and, of course, Geek Vibes Nation. He spends the later months of each year editing an annual video countdown of the year’s 25 best films. You can find more of his musings on Letterboxd (willbjarnar) and on X (@bywillbjarnar).
