Director: Lynne Ramsay
Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Pattinson, LaKeith Stanfield, Nick Nolte, Sissy Spacek
Rating: (R16)
★★★★
REVIEWED BY AMASIO JUTEL
Jennifer Lawrence is on fire in Lynne Ramsay’s impressionistic film about the weird and terrifying experience of postpartum depression. Die My Love (Rialto) is the psychological nightmare of socially alienating in-laws, emotionally absent partners and newborn babies.
Grace (Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson) move from New York to Montana, into the estate of Jackson’s recently departed uncle. There, between intense sexual relations and even more intense anxiety-inducing social relations, the two find an estrangement in their relationship in the form of a baby.
Lawrence is the powerhouse of the film. Entering Grace’s shattering consciousness, we come to understand the profound alienation and horror of her experience.
Recklessly abandoned, physically and emotionally, by Jackson, her neglected feelings bubble to the surface, exploding in plunges through glass doors and absent-minded wandering.
Die My Love expertly treads the fine line between empathy for her experiences and questioning her actions.
It’s never clear what’s really happening in the film, or what moments of the heightened nightmare are translated by the non-linear narrative structure and dim lighting. Emotion-forward storytelling messes with her head and ours, pointing Chekhov’s shotgun at people and things in deeply uncomfortable ways.
Ramsay and Lawrence together sustain all of this with a tinge of comedy that interrupts the pure discomfort and keeps you in the film, and Lawrence’s ability to translate this empathy through the combative editing style easily makes this her defining performance of the past 10 years.
A literal turn in the last act briefly attempts to solve the mysteries of her emotions, removing us from her subjectivity to "true reality", but a barrage of fake-out endings subvert back to the primal feelings in a fiery finale.
