What Is a Woman Supposed to Do With a Feeling That Has No Acceptable Shape?
Die My Love (2025) – English – Lynne Ramsay – Psychological Drama – 118 min, Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Pattinson, Sissy Spacek, LaKeith Stanfield, Nick Nolte
A woman moves through tall grass on all fours. She is clutching a kitchen knife. Across the lawn, her baby lies in the sunlight, unhurt, unaware. She is not threatening the baby. She is not threatening anyone. She is simply — and this is the film's first, most precise image — in a state that has no name in polite conversation, and no safe container, and no socially acceptable form of expression.
This is where Lynne Ramsay begins. Not with the diagnosis. Not with the backstory. With the body, in the grass, in the morning light, already too far from shore.
Grace is a writer. She has moved with her boyfriend Jackson to a farmhouse in rural Montana, which is beautiful in the way that places are beautiful when they offer no exit. She has recently had a baby. The baby is alive, fed, accounted for. Grace herself is disappearing — not suddenly, not dramatically, but in the gradual, incremental way that a person disappears when the life arranged around them has no room for who they actually are.
Ramsay, working from Ariana Harwicz's ferocious Argentine novel and a screenplay co-written with playwright Enda Walsh, refuses to organise this deterioration into the neat grammar of a breakdown narrative. There is no arc of decline. There is no pivot toward recovery. What there is instead is the texture of Grace's inner life — raw, funny, furious, and relentlessly physical — rendered with the same visceral intelligence Ramsay brought to We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) and You Were Never Really Here (2017).
She is not making a film about postpartum depression. She is making a film from inside it. The difference is everything.
Jennifer Lawrence has never done anything like this. That alone would be worth noting. But what she achieves here is more than range — it is a complete dissolution of the self-consciousness that occasionally keeps even good performances at a slight remove from truth. Grace is earthy, acid-tongued, unexpectedly comic, and terrifying in her moments of stillness. Lawrence gives her all of these registers simultaneously, moving between them with the unpredictability of someone who is not performing instability but living it.
At a children's birthday party, a well-meaning woman tells Grace that people don't talk enough about how hard parenting is. Grace replies, flatly, that that's all anyone ever talks about. It is a funny line. It is also a window into a mind that cannot locate itself in the approved emotional vocabulary of young motherhood — that finds the language of shared experience more isolating than silence would be.
Robert Pattinson plays Jackson with a specific, carefully observed helplessness. He loves Grace. He does not know what to do with Grace. He is a man watching someone he loves become someone he cannot reach, and his response — the absences, the worry that tips into frustration, the persistent failure to give her what she needs because he does not know what she needs — is not cruelty. It is something more honest and more damaging than cruelty. It is inadequacy in the face of something that exceeds his understanding.
Cinematographer Seamus McGarvey shoots in a claustrophobic aspect ratio, tight and pressing, the frame itself a kind of enclosure. The Montana landscape — vast, indifferent, stunning — should offer release. It doesn't. Ramsay frames it in ways that make the openness feel hostile, the beauty feel like a reproach. The farmhouse interior accumulates detail and pressure in equal measure.
There is a shot early in the film: Grace stands in her writing room, looking at ink blotches on paper. Her breast milk begins to drip onto the page, mingling with the ink. It is a brief image, unannounced, quietly extraordinary — a woman's creative self and her bodily self bleeding into each other, inseparable, neither one fully her own anymore.
Ramsay works this way throughout. She does not explain. She shows, obliquely and precisely, and trusts the accumulation of images to do what language cannot.
Ramsay plays with chronology — not consistently, not as a system, but in the way a fractured mind plays with chronology, returning to moments without warning, skipping forward, introducing figures who arrive like ghosts from scenes that haven't happened yet. It is a formal strategy that has divided viewers, and understandably so. But it is also the most honest available structure for what the film is depicting. A mind in this state does not experience time linearly. Ramsay declines to impose linearity on it as a courtesy to the audience.
Sissy Spacek appears as Jackson's mother, Pam — grieving her own loss, offering Grace a warmth that is genuine and ultimately insufficient. Their scenes together are among the film's most delicate, two women in different registers of surviving a life that has not gone as expected, finding and losing each other across the distance of their different kinds of pain.
"How come you lost your mind for six months and then found it? How come I haven't found mine?"
Grace asks this of a woman at a party who has cheerfully assured her that new motherhood drives everyone temporarily insane. The question arrives not as self-pity but as genuine, unanswerable inquiry — the kind that polite company absorbs and deflects without responding to, because responding would require an honesty the social occasion cannot accommodate.
Die My Love is Ramsay's fifth film in over two decades, and it sits naturally in a lineage of cinema about women whose interiority exceeds the structures built to contain them. Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman (1975) is the formal ancestor — the domestic space as a pressure chamber, repetition as a measure of psychic cost, the body performing its obligations while something beneath breaks apart. Both films trust duration and the mundane detail to carry what a more conventionally dramatic cinema would require a scene of crisis to deliver.
Among contemporaries, the film belongs beside Andrea Arnold's American Honey (2016) and Josephine Decker's Madeline's Madeline (2018) — films equally committed to female subjectivity as a formal problem, equally willing to let the camera become porous to a woman's inner weather rather than merely observing it from outside. All three films understand that the most radical thing cinema can do with a woman in extremis is to refuse to explain her.
And the novel's Argentine roots connect the film, beneath the surface, to Lucrecia Martel — to the particular suffocation of La Ciénaga (2001) and The Headless Woman (2008), films about women in houses that have become worlds, worlds that have become prisons, the heat and the inertia and the slow, almost imperceptible dissolution of a self.
Die My Love is not an easy film. It is repetitive at times, deliberately circular, and it refuses the consolation of resolution because the thing it is depicting — the way a mind can come undone inside a life that looks, from outside, perfectly adequate — does not resolve on a schedule that cinema finds convenient.
What it offers instead is rarer. The experience of being inside it. Fully, uncomfortably, without the glass of narrative distance between you and Grace, between you and the grass, the knife, the baby in the sunlight.
And Ramsay holds the image — the beauty of the morning, the wrongness of the woman in it, the impossibility of separating the two — for exactly as long as it takes you to understand that this is not a story about a woman going mad.
It is a story about a world that has no room for what she is.
Which is not the same thing.
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