Die My Love is a film driven by primal urges. The film, based on the novel by Ariana Harwicz and directed by Lynne Ramsay, often feels like a fever dream. When Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson) move into a rustic old house near the woods, they can’t keep their hands off each other. They have sex on the floor, grabbing at their bodies hungrily. They play music loud and dance together, filling the house with their mad love. Grace quickly gets pregnant, and soon they have a son to round out their little family. They take on traditional roles–Jackson goes into the city to work and Grace stays home with the baby. Jackson’s mother Pam (Sissy Spacek) comes by as much as she can, especially after the death of her husband Harry (Nick Nolte). There’s no reason why their lives wouldn’t be blissful, especially after they finish mourning. But it’s not just Harry they lose in the time between Grace’s pregnancy and the birth of her son.
Before, Grace was a writer, but that came to an end the moment she became a mother. Instead, she fills her days with wandering in the woods, rebelling against her position as a stay-at-home mother, and fantasizing about Karl (LaKeith Stanfield), a mysterious biker who likely isn’t even real. She can hear the engine of his bike gliding across the road whenever she’s feeling restless. It’s as if she’s writing a novel in her head. But whenever she’s near the office in her house that Jackson set up for her, Grace can’t write a single word. Her body surges with everything she cannot say. Whenever she interacts with the biker, he never speaks. She doesn’t say much either. Even in her own head, Grace can’t verbalize her struggles, needs or desires. The film’s script, written by Ramsay with Enda Walsh and Alice Birch, is naturalistic and often dreamy, blurring reality and the fantasies in Grace’s mind.
Stir-crazy and unable to articulate her thoughts and feelings to Jackson, Grace becomes increasingly self-destructive, damaging her body, her relationships with other people and even the house she lives in. All the while, her infant son remains unharmed–she wants to destroy everything else, but not him. She’s gentle with her son, keeping him close as often as she can. Though there are times, early in the film, when Ramsay wants us to question this, like when she leaves a kitchen knife lying next to his carrier, within reach. But as Die My Love goes on and Grace unravels further, her love for her son is the only constant, even when she runs off into the woods for hours, wandering in search of freedom, she takes him with her. Grace is only at peace among the trees, as if life is easier the further away from modern civilization she goes.
The film, like Grace, wanders through space and time as if in its own dreamlike trance. Though the opening zooms through Grace’s pregnancy, Ramsay jumps back to highlight Grace’s tender relationship with Jackson’s father, Harry. In his deteriorating mental state, Harry is not much different than a child, speaking freely with no thought towards coherence. It’s only after he dies that Grace builds a meaningful relationship with Pam, as both women mourn the people they used to be. Grace mourns her independence, while Pam mourns being a wife and the sense of purpose it gave her. Both women seem to need each other, but the barrier of experience gets in the way. Pam struggles to understand why Grace acts as if her life is over when in her eyes, it’s just begun. How can an old woman be so full of life while the younger one seems to yearn for death?
Though Jackson seems to genuinely love Grace, his cluelessness exacerbates the situation. The moment they move in, Grace remarks that she wants a cat. But not long after the birth of their son, he comes home with a temperamental dog whose barking annoys Grace and scares the baby. Soon, the house is filled with the sound of loud barking, Grace mimicking the barking and her crying son, disturbed by all the chaos. Meanwhile, Jackson is in the city working, drinking, and hooking up with other women to deal with the stress of a situation that he is partially to blame for. Perhaps Jackson thought Grace would raise their son the way Pam raised him, gentle and dutiful. Though we don’t learn much about their marriage, the brief glimpse we see of Pam and Harry before his death suggests a traditional patriarchal country home. Jackson wants a repeat of the life he lived with his parents–even settling in his late uncle’s house just down the street from his mother. Everything was supposed to fall right into place.
But things unravel almost immediately, beginning with the dog. One night, it won’t stop whining, so Grace sneaks into Pam’s house, takes her shotgun and kills the dog. In the morning, Jackson solemnly digs a grave for it, ready to accept that he was wrong to bring it home when he knew Grace didn’t want it. But Grace can never let things settle. It’s as if the pain of childbirth broke a threshold and now she deliberately hurts herself with feral defiance. She watches him dig from inside the house and then throws her body through the glass door, crashing into the ground outside. A few days later, after Jackson fails to get hard during a lackluster sexual encounter, Grace comes home and destroys the bathroom, tearing at the walls with her bare hands. But even as their relationship deteriorates, Jackson proposes and the two get married. All the while, Jackson and Pam try to reason with Grace, but she remains a mystery they cannot solve.
Lawrence pulls from her past performances in American Hustle, Serena, Silver Linings Playbook and Joy in her portrayal of Grace. If this were her final film, future critics would say that her role in Die My Love was the culmination of her onscreen presence. Lawrence has made a name for herself playing young, authoritative women who demand attention and respect from everyone around her. The one major exception in her filmography is mother!—there she plays a young woman who wants to be the authority in her house, but no one seems to respect her. They damage her home and eventually kill her child, leaving her so distraught she can’t go on living. In Die My Love, her house is a prison she wants to destroy, even though it houses and protects her child. The films feel like companion pieces, in a morbid way, revealing two sides of motherhood.
If Die My Love has a secret weapon, it’s Spacek, whose peaceful folksy energy contrasts perfectly with Lawrence’s raw anger and yearning. The casting of them as mother and daughter-in-law is a stroke of genius from Ramsay, with the rural setting reminding us of Spacek’s early work in films like Badlands, 3 Women and Coal Miner’s Daughter. There are moments in this film where Spacek quietly reveals her own strength and inner darkness. While Grace is a firecracker, Pam is perhaps more like another classic Spacek performance—Carrie White in Brian De Palma’s famous horror classic. We know Pam is capable of an explosion, even if we don’t see it, because she can see it in Grace. But unlike Jackson, that knowledge doesn’t scare her. Die My Love is a film unafraid of chaos, destruction and the unique madness of women.
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