Most films about new mothers ask for our sympathy. Die My Love asks only that we witness, without comfort or catharsis, as Grace (portrayed with unflinching gracelessness by Jennifer Lawrence) destroys everything around her. You are not supposed to like Grace. She says cruel things, acts abnormally, and spirals into violence without redemption or catharsis. The intentional discomfort is the point. Director Lynne Ramsay uses formal chaos—particularly through aggressive sound design—to drag us inside the mind unraveling from postpartum psychosis, and her “Die My Love” is essential big-screen art cinema: an audiovisual achievement that demands to be seen like an installation in a museum.
The film follows Grace, a self-described writer who never puts words on the page. She and Jackson (Robert Pattinson) have just inherited his uncle’s Montana house and had their first baby, but Grace seems capable only of wrong reaction and never the right action. This paralysis of wanting without doing extends to everything in her new life. Their intimacy has reduced to sporadic sex, which Grace increasingly uses as an outlet rather than connection. Throughout the film, Grace manifests social dysfunction and violent impulses. Alone, she trashes the bathroom on impulse, jumps through glass, and eventually commits an act of violence against their newly adopted dog. The film makes no attempt to soften these moments or provide psychological comfort.
Lawrence commits fully to this portrait of gracelessness, delivering what can be described as a Freudian study of oral fixation and arrested development. She portrays a woman whose infant-like impulses persist into adulthood. Her performance excels at provoking discomfort and nervous laughter. One scene finds Grace facing Jackon’s grieving mother (Sissy Spacek) and asking if the dead uncle shot himself in the ass, delivered with perfect comic timing yet zero social awareness. In other interactions, she answers strangers and acquaintances with sarcasm that curdles into something meaner, more deliberately hurtful. But these aren’t quirks. They are symptoms of a mind that has lost the ability to perform basic social scripts. It’s the kind of deliberately uncomfortable performance that justifies the theatrical experience: watching Lawrence weaponizes her charisma into something repellent yet hypnotic.
Standing beside her, Robert Pattinson plays another variation on the rural working-class character he’s made his post-Twilight specialty since ‘The Rover.’ Pattinson’s Jackson is well-meaning but dim, speaking in the cadence of someone always a beat behind. He is fundamentally unable to comprehend what’s happening to his partner, which makes him the perfect foil for Grace’s escalating psychosis. His “normalcy” only amplifies her alienation.
ut the film’s most crucial performance comes from its sound design. The opening announces this with a sonic assault on the audience: distorted electric guitar cranked beyond any pedal’s capability, loud enough to make you question the theater’s equipment (recalling the Interstellar sound mix controversy). Is this recklessness or by design? The answer becomes clear as the film progresses. We’re experiencing the world through Grace’s hypersensitive auditory perception, where every sound is amplified and invasive. The film’s sound design team constructs a subjective sonic landscape that becomes the key to understanding Grace’s deterioration. She notices what others don’t: whispers at conversation edges, door creaks in distant rooms, the rhythmic thump of a volleyball being dribbled far behind. In conventional films, these exist as atmospheric details. Here, they’re textual cues revealing that Grace occupies a different sensory reality than everyone around her. The dog’s late-night barking isn’t background noise, it’s an assault. Radio playing in the car that her husband loves becomes unbearable. When Grace tells Jackson she hates guitar sounds, it’s not preference. It’s survival instinct against sonic torture.
This sonic chaos finds its visual complement in the film’s 35mm Ektachrome cinematography. DoP Seamus McGarvey bathes Montana in sickly cyan highlights that make the landscape feel contaminated rather than pastoral. The inherited house and the garden landscape around it, which should represent new beginnings, instead appears chromatic wrongness incarnate.
“Die My Love” warrants a theatrical viewing for its unhinged central performance, for sound editing that makes you complicit in psychological collapse, and for cinematography that makes pastoral America look like a crime scene. Don’t enter expecting linear storytelling or moral clarity. Enter prepared to be challenged by cinema as a confluence of art, technical craft, and performance. If you accept the film on these terms, you will be rewarded with a formally audacious work that captures something terrible about mental deterioration, postpartum psychosis, and the impossibility of maternal perfection.
The film opens and concludes with a forest fire of unclear origin. No resolution, no redemption. Just the logical endpoint of a mind that has been burning from the inside all along.
