Die My Love

Lynne Ramsay turns post-partum despair into a brutal, intimate portrait of a mind unraveling

Lynne Ramsay is not a director to shy away from taboo subjects, especially regarding parenting. Her indie hit, We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) explored the guilt a mother has for heavily disliking her child, You Were Never Really Here (2017) delved into how a surrogate man can prove to be more of a father figure than one’s biological patriarch. Her latest, Die My Love (2025) peers into the dark recesses of post-partum depression.

Die My Love follows the young couple Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson) who move from New York to rural Montana. Grace soon bears a child and falls into a deep depression. While Jackson is largely away to work, Grace intermittently visits her mother-in-law (Sissy Spacek) and is tempted by a mysterious biker (Lakeith Stanfield) who passes by her house every day.

As with most of Ramsay’s films, Die My Love is edited and shot as if one were inside our protagonist’s minds, wading through memories and being guided by an emotional compass rather than a narrative one. It’s not surrealism, but when in flashbacks we see some actions seeming in a memory, bleed into the present. Depression does feel atemporal, where one feels both stuck in the present and in the past. Die My Love is structured in that way to have you submerged in Grace’s ennui and despair, yet the film doesn’t ask for pity. Grace isn’t so much a subject we sympathize with as a vessel we are enveloped in. Ramsay is brilliant at showing the frustrating juxtaposition that life delivers, as if providing a rational counterargument to any emotional complaint – as if emotions ever follow reason. We get stunning shots of the open plains of Montana, with vast expanses of sky, yet Grace feels horribly trapped and claustrophobic, also aided by a 4:3 aspect ratio, boxing her in.

Die My Love showcases how the silence of one’s suffering is imposed when its felt as if a complaint isn’t justified. This is exploited particularly with the central relationship, and the evasion of sex. It might feel like small friction on paper, as Jackson comes home tired, yet we are injected with the devastation and anger festering in Grace upon feeling rejected.

When in a depression, the regression away from reason can make us feel like unmoored ships or mindless animals, the imagery of which is physically brought to life by Lawrence who frequently crawls on all fours or hinges her upper body and sways when overwhelmed. It’s a cog added to the editing, cinematography, and sound design – which features ultra loud music and an incessantly barking dog – and make you wonder how Grace has not snapped yet. It is a way to bring you part of the way to the experience young mothers suffering depression endure, where they reach a point when they can’t see a way out, with each day and night feeling endless.

Die My Love won rave reviews at Cannes this year, where it premiered, largely thanks to Lawrence’s performance. Yet many performances and films are overly praised at festivals and later are met with a general shrug. Lawrence, however, delivers not only her career-best performance, but one of the best pieces of acting I have seen in years. Hers is an all-encompassing tour de force that I will not be able to do justice in this review. She holds each contradiction, repressed emotion, and physical pain with an aplomb and mastery, I’ll need to watch the film a few more times to figure out how she’s done it. She never seeks your pity, but rather bares experience and vulnerability with a ferocity and honesty that she consumes the entire screen. Hers is a performance I will remember long after and marks a high point in a young career already filled with high water marks. Pattinson is a second fiddle yet serviceable as Jackson, he has the particularly difficult job of making rejections of Lawrence’s sexual overtures seem believable. Spacek is also strong in a small role, as a mother-in-law who seems to be the only one who sees Grace and her pain.

Ramsay delivers the deepest and most honest look into post-partum depression that we’ve yet gotten on film, adding to the growing number of films normalizing the discussion of this important subject matter. Ramsay’s tilt into the stream of consciousness structure and slight surrealism does tip a bit over towards the finale, as the film becomes more of a cypher than a gut-punch, yet it doesn’t draw away from the emotional immersion that Die My Love manages for the rest of the runtime. Aided by a masterclass performance from Lawrence, Die My Love is a must-watch film, and one I won’t soon forget.

8.9/10