The film Die My Love takes place mostly in a remote farmhouse. Tucked away amid tall grasses and verdant woods in rural Montana, it seems idyllic. But Grace (played by Jennifer Lawrence) appears uncomfortable as soon as she sets foot inside her new home. She flops over like a rag doll while her boyfriend, Jackson (Robert Pattinson), explores the building, which he inherited from his uncle. Months later, she and Jackson have a baby. Grace becomes a doting mother, but the house becomes the subject of her wrath. She demolishes a mirror, claws at the bathroom wallpaper, and smashes through a glass door. Something about living in this place is breaking her mind.
At first glance, Grace resembles the type of mothers who have become a dominant cinematic presence in recent years—women portrayed as troubled about being a caregiver. This year has seen a spate of them: In the propulsive psychological dramedy If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You, Rose Byrne plays Linda, whose daughter has special needs; at the end of the film, after a series of escalating disasters, Linda throws herself repeatedly into the ocean as if hoping the waves will subsume her. In the horror movie Bring Her Back, Sally Hawkins depicts a grieving foster parent who goes to extreme lengths to remedy the mistakes she made as a mom. Even the mainstream studio movie One Battle After Another hinges on the intimate drama of caretaking, the story unspooling after a woman abandons her infant.
As someone who’s lonely, caustic, and adrift, Grace may share some of those women’s traits, but she’s never at a loss about what to do with her child. Die My Love draws much of its raw power from Grace’s love for her son, Harry; the director, Lynne Ramsay, a master at precisely conveying a character’s inner life, creates a kaleidoscopic study of Grace’s shattered headspace while showing how Harry serves as her lone anchor. The demands of being a mother, as a result, are only ever a red herring for Grace’s pain—a significant change from the source material, a 2012 novel by Ariana Harwicz, in which the protagonist is much more detached from her baby. In a field of movies this year that dwell on women tormented by motherhood, Die My Love is the exception. Grace puts it well: “I don’t have a problem attaching to my son,” she says. “He’s perfect. It’s everything else that’s fucked.”
That “everything else” is, for Grace, hard to define. By avoiding the obvious culprit for her suffering—her identity as a new mother—Die My Love beckons the viewer closer, encouraging them to make sense of her. The film is packed with nods to what else is going on: She wants Jackson’s attention but frequently lashes out at him when he’s home. She indulges in barefoot walks with Harry while she wears flowy, flowery dresses, the picture of an earthy, grounded mother, but bristles at a store clerk who coos at Harry and compliments her. Again and again, Grace receives unsolicited parenting advice, some of which she quietly accepts, and some of which she dismisses with sharp retorts. Although those around her believe that Grace, an aspiring author who is unable to get started on her book, is immobilized by the weight of motherhood, what’s actually happening seems to be much more complex. The ignored “voice within women,” Betty Friedan wrote in The Feminine Mystique, yearns for “something more than my husband and my children and my home.” But that’s not true of Grace: She actually wants Jackson and Harry and a happy life with them. Maintaining a house in the woods seemed ideal, too; a peaceful locale was supposed to help her focus on the writing she’d intended to do.
As I watched Die My Love, I thought of what the director Maggie Gyllenhaal told me when we spoke about her movie The Lost Daughter, an adaptation of an Elena Ferrante novel in which a woman abandons her children for three years. Gyllenhaal explained that, to her, two types of mothers exist on-screen: the “fantasy mother,” perfect in every way, and the “monstrous mother,” who embarks on a redemption arc over the course of the story. Grace is neither, and yet also both at once. She bakes Harry’s birthday cake and then slinks, catlike, across the front lawn with a knife in her hand. She dances before his carrier to cheer him up, but keeps him awake when she feels restless. Grace is in limbo, the film posits, mired in a crisis seemingly brought on by her inability to see herself as either archetype of a young mother. An early, pointed visual captures this idea: Months before she gives birth, Grace approaches the house and pauses just short of the entrance. She’s framed through a series of doorways, simultaneously outside the walls and trapped within them.
Lawrence is superb at exemplifying Grace’s confusion. She alternates fluidly between domestic tranquility and feral rage, often in the same scene. Even as Grace’s grasp on reality seems to slip, her turbulence comes off as entirely natural; Lawrence’s performance hints at years of built-up frustration about circumstances that her character can’t bring herself to articulate. In Grace she unearths a primal fear: that a person can fail to understand herself—and, as such, perhaps can’t be helped. Grace appears dazed when others pick up on her ache, and takes a perverse pleasure in Jackson’s struggle to deal with her deteriorating mental health. Lawrence also finds a naivete to Grace’s agony: After scrabbling so hard at the walls that her fingertips bleed, Grace acts like a wounded child, taken aback by her own strength. It’s no wonder she’s bonded so tightly with her equally guileless infant son.
This isn’t Ramsay’s first portrait of a distraught parent. In the haunting 2011 drama We Need to Talk About Kevin, the director explored the psyche of a mother (Tilda Swinton) whose son committed a series of unspeakably violent crimes. The final scene is soundtracked by the Washington Phillips song “Mother’s Last Word to Her Son”; it’s an ironic pick that underlines the distance between the movie’s lead characters. Phillips croons about a mother’s bond with her child as Swinton walks off, her character freshly wrecked by a visit with her son in prison.
Die My Love also features a meaningful song choice. John Prine’s duet with Iris Dement, “In Spite of Ourselves,” comes on the car radio one day, and Grace insists on turning the volume up to sing along. Prine’s and Dement’s voices mix with Pattinson’s and Lawrence’s as they serenade each other about how they’ll be together forever. It’s a bouncy, sweet-sounding love song, but the lyrics are also full of eyebrow-raising digs: “He ain’t too sharp, but he gets things done,” and “She takes a lickin’ and keeps on tickin’.” The dissonance mirrors the film’s loopy approach to Grace. Her troubles—sleepless nights, endless exhaustion—could simply be the result of young parenthood. But the truth is far more complicated: She loves her family—she really does. She just can’t stand herself.
