Often beautiful and occasionally brilliant, Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love features a memorable performance by Jennifer Lawrence.
Premiering at Cannes 2025, Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love arrived at Rome Film Festival with — it’s fair to say — a not insignificant amount of buzz. Ramsay is known for delivering some of the most exciting, emotionally and visually intense indie hits of the last 15 years, including my personal favourite We Need to Talk About Kevin. Her track record, plus this truly star studded cast — including Jennifer Lawrence as Grace and Robert Pattinson as husband Jackson — placed incredibly high expectations upon this film.
Based on Ariana Harwicz’s 2012 novel, co-written with Alice Birch and Enda Walsh, Die My Love is another in a series of adaptions for Ramsay, who has a penchant for turning literature to the big screen. Another theme through Ramsay’s work is the exploration and representation of unusual family dynamics and in particular the complexities and difficulties of motherhood. This film is no exception, with Grace’s postnatal depression taking the terrifying centre stage under the washed out skies of an isolated Montana farmhouse.
We follow as this mother and her family descend into what can only be described as a complete and utter mental and physical unravelling of nightmarish proportions. It’s the kind of premise Ramsay knows how to inhabit — all quiet dread and domestic horror, where the everyday slips into the surreal. There is an eeriness, a tension and a static that seeps through the screen and reaches right out to the audience’s seats.
But while Die My Love is often beautiful and occasionally brilliant, it doesn’t quite find the precision of some of Ramsay’s other work. There’s an occasional bagginess to certain scenes that linger too long, emotions that repeat until they start to thin out. It’s never dull, but it lacks that focus, that sense of compression that made Kevin so remarkable.
Still, the film’s themes are fascinating — Ramsay’s latest exploration of the “odd” mother, a woman who exists outside the traditional lines of care and expectation. Postpartum depression has rarely — if ever — been explored on the big screen in such a manner and the physicality of Lawrence’s performance is, as ever, something to behold.
It’s not a bad film — far from it. But compared to Ramsay’s earlier, sharper works, Die My Love feels a little unmoored. You can sense the masterpiece it might have been, just beneath the surface.
