Ever since the Cannes Film Festival premiered Lynne Ramsay’s directorial debut, Ratcatcher (1999), it was self-evident that the Scottish auteur was a once-in-a-generation type of talent. In hindsight, it was less a premiere and more an announcement of a female filmmaker overflowing with artistic confidence, sophistication, and purpose. Twenty-six years later, she returned to that same festival in the south of France to deliver Die My Love (2025). All the radiant storytelling capabilities present in her debut have grown stronger, this time infused with the controlled rage of a superstar in Jennifer Lawrence, whose fearless intensity is the epicenter of the intimate, impressionistic epic.
Die My Love is only Ramsay’s fifth feature in over a quarter-century. There’s something to be said for a filmmaker who only shares their work with the world when they have something important to say. At the same time, it’s impossible not to recognize that the filmmaking ecosystem of the 21st century has so rarely supported, funded, and elevated uniquely female stories from female storytellers that the infrequency of her work cannot be attributed solely to the patience of her creative process. Amidst these obstacles, it’s a feat in itself that a film depicting a mother’s experience during postpartum struggles was greenlit to begin with.
Her films have always been potent confrontations. They force the audience into immersive, lucid sensory experiences that offer poetic inquiries into the psychology of human behavior in relation to the conditions of their surrounding environments. Often, that individual behavior is strange, violent, bizarre, or unsettling, but the environment they occupy is always defined by broader forces of reality that inform and mutate those decisions. Ramsay uses this collision of psychological introspection and the external pressures of trauma to exhibit how those people react with raw and brutal honesty.
In the example of Die My Love, Grace (Lawrence) and her partner Jackson (Robert Pattinson) move to a remote Montana house willed to Jackson by his late uncle (a traumatic underpinning to the events as they unravel). In a passionate flash of animalistic romance, a baby is brought into their lives. Grace stays home to care for their child while Jackson works long days, and in that time, the rural isolationism begins to compound the overwhelming effects of her postpartum psychosis.
In singular Ramsay fashion, reality starts to blur between the fever dreams of Grace’s state of mind and the manifestations of a setting whose walls feel like they are closing in around her. The pair’s relationship gradually deteriorates, and Grace’s self-destructive behavior intensifies. But as with all Ramsay protagonists, that behavior is not just the result of the internalized trauma; it’s also the consequence of a social condition that functions like a pressure cooker.
The inability of Jackson to fully comprehend Grace’s postpartum sympathies and inextricable emotional attachment to their child heightens the tension of the environment. The excruciating ruralness of her limited exposure to other people often forces upon her varying degrees of suffocating small-talk niceties that are staged like judgmental microaggressions. All the while, Jackson’s passive inattentiveness may seem harmless, but it’s his inability to see her whole truth as a human being that perpetuates her spiral. Eventually, Ramsay’s abstract impressionism is fully unleashed, and the hypnotic spell of Grace’s repetitive monotony is capitalized on to take the audience to the climax—a manic burst of pyrotechnic female fury shot vibrantly in the claustrophobic 35 mm of Seamus McGarvey.
Lawrence’s Grace joins the rare air of the four prior centerpieces in Ramsay’s feature work. They are complicated human beings searching for answers amidst paralyzing circumstances. Whether it’s James Gillespie escaping the filth that surrounds him during a Glasgow garbage strike, Morvern Callar running from the grief of her boyfriend’s recent suicide, Eva Khatchadourian coping with the damage her son has enacted against a suburban community, or Joe unleashing his post-traumatic trauma through violence as a form of societal cleansing, all of Ramsay’s protagonists confront their demons with a melancholic sense of spectacle.
In all these examples, I have never firsthand experienced the deeply felt numbness of their respective circumstances, and in reference to Die My Love, I will never join Grace in understanding the hallucinatory whirlwind of postpartum depression. But in every iteration of Lynne Ramsay’s work, I have handed myself over to a one-of-a-kind artist whose devastating visions demand your full attention and come out with a greater sense of perspective for their unique emotional circumstances.
One day, we may as a society reflect and wonder why we didn’t give people like Lynne Ramsay all the resources to share their voice and realize every project that interested them. We may wonder in utter disbelief why this medium we call art was not meritocratized rather than diluted by the economics of commercialization. In that hypothetical world, Lynne Ramsay would make 100 movies if she wanted to, and we as a society would learn from each of them. We would ache alongside Grace and the countless narrators of Ramsay’s mind, share in their agonies and desires to feel seen, and emerge better equipped to empathize with the people in our own surroundings. Alas, we do not live in that world. Not yet.
But we do live in a world where a brilliant talent like Jennifer Lawrence is willing to give every part of herself to Grace, to Lynne Ramsay, and to the collective audiences of Die My Love to channel a severe, raw, and candid portrait of motherhood to learn from, and that’s a pretty remarkable timeline to be a part of.
Review Courtesy of Danny Jarabek
Feature Image Credit to MUBI via IMDb