Die My Love
by Hope Madden
Earlier this year, filmmaker Michael Shanks and real-life marrieds Alison Brie and Dave Franco examined man’s fear of losing his identity to couplehood in the weirdly romantic horror, Together.
Lynne Ramsay’s latest, Die My Love, looks at it from a slightly more skewed perspective.
For Grace (Jennifer Lawrence), the horror seems to be gradual disappearance, a total loss of who you were with no new version to take its place. A new home—well, old home inherited by boyfriend Jackson (Robert Pattinson)—in a new and isolated spot, and a new baby all seem to leech from Grace whatever it was that had held her together. Her attempts to contend with this vanishing, this mundane nonexistence, are a volcanic, often hilarious and just as often terrifying wonder from a phenomenal talent in top form.
The inimitable Ramsay, along with Enda Walsh and Alice Birch, adapts Ariana Harwicz’s novel. The loosely constructed narrative presents atmosphere and context more than plot. Grace and Jackson move into the now-vacated Montana home. It’s perhaps not ideal, but who cares? It’s theirs, it’s free, and Grace can write all day.
But she doesn’t, nor does she fit in (or try) with Jackson’s family. Boredom, new motherhood, sexual frustration, a negligent husband, and isolation all weigh on Grace, and in every instance, her reaction startles and fascinates.
Lawrence is fearless— that’s nothing new—but here she is alive, on fire. Funny and heartbreaking, fierce and merciless, aching but rarely vulnerable, Lawrence’s command of this film is breathtaking.
An impressive ensemble—Pattinson, Sissy Spacek, Nick Nolte, LaKeith Stanfield—exist more to offer opportunities for Lawrence to react than to craft full characters. But few directors can craft an individual scene, or string together scene after scene after scene, as transfixing as those conjured by Ramsay.
And her dreamlike creations seem always to nurture an unparallelled performance from some of the greatest actors working: We Need to Talk About Kevin’s Tilda Swinton, You Were Never Really Here’s Joaquin Phoenix, and now, Die My Love’s Lawrence, whose raw sensuality, anger, and sadness command attention.
The film’s lack of cohesion, of clear path or plot, weaken the effort. Die My Love is more character study than story, but Grace is a character that can’t be known. This is her burden and her glory, but an unknowable character makes for a tough study.
But, though you may walk away from Die My Love wondering what it is you just watched, you’ll not likely forget what you saw.
