Director: Lynne Ramsay
Stars: Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Pattinson, Sissy Spacek
There’s a meme doing the rounds at the minute which reads, “i[sic] can handle all of life’s traumas but god forbid 3 noises play at the same time”. It’s a sentiment that very much sprang to mind while watching the great Lynne Ramsay’s uncompromising latest, her first since she joined forces with Joaquin Phoenix for 2017’s traumatised hitman thriller You Were Never Really Here. Following a couple of exploratory trips into the male psyche, Ramsay swings the pendulum back the other way and takes us deep inside the cranium of a woman on the verge of a (perpetual) nervous breakdown. And Die My Love – based on the novel by Ariana Harwicz – extrapolates that interiority with dizzying intensity. To sit in front of it is to feel as though one has a hornet buzzing away inside one’s skull. It is, very simply, one of the most irritating and unpleasant cinema experiences I’ve ever had…
[long, long pause]… (complimentary).
Jennifer Lawrence is Grace, here partnered with possibly-impotent, probably-unfaithful but ultimately still loving Jackson (Robert Pattinson). The pair move into his late uncle Frank’s dilapidated house somewhere in the rural snarls of New York state. She’s a writer. He does… something on the road. Almost immediately we come to realise that there’s some narrative chopping and changing going on. A-chronologically we watch them settle in, fuck, have a baby, and get the swift sense that Grace is struggling with it all. Things grow more linear, but dissonance reasserts itself in other ways. The baby cries. Jackson brings home a dog that doesn’t stop yelping for a solid 20-minute stretch. Incessant noises stack up in the sound design and Die My Love does a credible job of becoming overwhelming.
As someone who finds any dog barking to be simply unpleasant, I nearly left. I was almost out the door.
But I persisted because Ramsay’s methodology here is as invigorating as it is deliberately infuriating. Die My Love wants us to feel beset. It wants us hounded. It wants us climbing the walls. Because that is where Grace is. Ramsay goads us further. Time and again she has her actors go big, brash, rambunctious. There are edgelordish tendencies in her characters’ behaviour, in the dialogue and often obtuse narrative (in)coherence, like she’s daring us to give up entirely, just as Grace pushes Jackson to his limits so that she can investigate where those limits lie. There’s a profoundly well understood love language within Grace’s malady. Her efforts to self-detonate belie her desperation to be stopped or contained. Or simply held. But Jackson is frustratingly passive.
Ramsay will let us let our guard down, then detonate another loud bomb in the movie’s temperament, frequently to the sound of shattering glass; that fragile, reflective substance through which Grace is forced to see herself. Some will be tempted to frame Die My Love as a spiritual successor to Lawrence’s domesticity stress-dream mother! for Darren Aronofsky, but where that film (which I also loved) is more concerned with a heavily played religious allegory, Lawrence’s collaboration with Ramsay is all about the forever raging tempest that is woman. One normie friend at a party tries to broach the subject of post-natal depression with Grace, who reacts defensively by making fun of her, and one senses that this is too small or easy an answer for what ails her. Another reductive boxing up of a woman into a category. Grace would rather sprawl like some betentacled leviathan.
Lawrence is incredible in that rare, utterly fearless way that verges on the terrible. Die My Love is primed to be chopped up into GIFs, obliterated from context. Hashtag Rot Girl Winter. Grace is liable to become a warrior for an ironic unserious sense of self-expression, but the character and this movie are entirely legitimate, straight-faced and intentional. Die My Love is all of this person’s internal demons exploded out onto a cinematic canvas; the messier the better.
It’ll send a lot of people reeling, and that’s okay. This is a perverse movie designed not to be enjoyed but endured and then grimly, guardedly respected. I had a fucking horrible time but, damn it, I’ve got to admit I’m almost certainly going to end up going to bat for it. It’s precocious, dotted with attempts to tire or cause consternation, but like some abstract splatter painting there’s something complete and compelling about it when viewed from a distance.
This duality of purpose and enjoyment exists also in the film’s very visual language. Seamus McGarvey’s daytime photography is among the most resplendent seen all year. Warm, honeyed, even overripe. This contrasted with the dull, flat nighttime cinematography, shorn of any sense of lustre or depth. There’s no being passive with Die My Love. Its very form is perpetually at odds with itself. A Jekyll and Hide routine.
How in the hell to score this thing, which delights with sublime needle-drops evoking a rinky-dink Americana, only to deafen with howls or rasp with the scratching of bloody fingernails down the wallpaper? It’s a masochist’s dream that many simply won’t have the patience for. I don’t know if I’d privately recommend it to anyone, not without a hefty and earnest set of disclaimers and trigger warnings in the preamble. It made me roll my eyes so many times. But I’d also watch it again. And I think I’m in its corner. (I think).
So take the below with a pinch of salt that, at any given moment while the movie is playing you could pick another number from 1 to 10 out of a hat and be right on the money.
Jesus it’s a fucking horror show being a woman, and then there’s men to deal with, too. Burn it all.
The Lost Highway Hotel 