Die My Love, Lynne Ramsay’s fifth movie, ends with a well-known tune sung by an unfamiliar voice: The director herself delivers a stripped-down model of Pleasure Division’s 1980 hit “Love Will Tear Us Aside.” Marital-breakdown songs are normally the stuff of nation and western, however this stark post-punk anthem was written by Manchester’s Ian Curtis, who married at 19 in 1975 and was lifeless, by suicide, a month earlier than his most well-known tune was launched, 45 years in the past, nearly to the day (if you happen to’re studying this throughout Cannes 2025). Ramsay’s mesmerizing movie is as shut as you would possibly get to seeing Curtis’ tune come to life, the brutal however lovely story of a married lady’s psychological disintegration as post-natal melancholy consumes and obliterates her.
The well-known saying has it that hell is different individuals, however right here, hell for different individuals is Grace (Jennifer Lawrence), a big-city writer who has moved to the center of nowhere to be near the household of her husband Jackson (Robert Pattinson). Jackson has inherited his uncle’s home, miles from the closest neighbor however inside strolling distance of his mom Pam (Sissy Spacek). They’ve massive plans; they wish to recharge their batteries and create. “It’s nothing like New York right here,” Jackson tells Grace, with an excessive amount of understatement, and the movie covers their first 12 months there in beneath 10 minutes, as they make violent love, have a toddler and have a good time his first birthday.
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The darkish display screen that begins the movie is a sign of the place we’re, an important, black void accompanied by the buzzing of a fly, a sound that returns intermittently and, with the magic of Dolby Atmos, even appears to ricochet around the auditorium. Grace and Jackson are miles from wherever, and their isolation is emphasised when Jackson seems as much as the sky via a telescope, wanting on the crowded canvas that’s the sky. He talks excitedly about parallel worlds and infinite potentialities, however Grace shuts him down. “Am I boring you?” he asks. “Not you, child, the universe” she replies. “Who offers a shit?”
That is the primary inkling that Grace is perhaps on one other planet, however in the intervening time it’s doable that she’s only a wiseacre Manhattanite coming to phrases with life within the sticks. A visit to the grocery store with child Harry appears to bear this out, with a combative trade on the until. “Discovered all the things you’re in search of?” asks the impossibly perky cashier. “In life?” Grace snorts, and the scathing takedown that follows the poor lady’s makes an attempt at small speak is uncomfortable to look at.
By this level, Grace has develop into a stay-at-home mother; Jackson is off doing no matter he does (there’s a obscure suggestion that he’s a musician, with a day job that pays the wages), leaving Grace alone with the newborn. Ramsay portrays this seize in a disturbing sequence set to Toni Basil’s “Mickey,” during which Lawrence makes grotesque shapes, compulsively uttering the phrase “All righty.” However Grace isn’t a home goddess, and her disinterest in housekeeping is additional underlined when Jackson comes residence with a canine (“We’d like a cat,” she says). The canine shortly turns into a key component of the story, its incessant barking, just like the buzzing of the fly and the crying of the newborn, woven into the unnerving soundscape (like You Had been By no means Actually Right here, there’s lots taking place aurally).
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The primary particular person to essentially choose up on what’s taking place with Grace is her mother-in-law Pam, nonetheless grieving for her late, Alzheimer’s-afflicted husband (Nick Nolte), whose shirts she irons six months after his loss of life. “All people goes a bit of crazy the primary 12 months,” Pam tells her, however Grace resents the inference of post-natal melancholy. Nonetheless, there’s little question one thing is incorrect, as Grace turns into harmful, self-sabotaging and turns into unusually infatuated with a motorcyclist (LaKeith Stanfield) that she might or will not be having an affair with. An try and patch issues up by getting married makes issues even worse, resulting in what’s arguably the movie’s most sudden and genuinely stunning scene.
One would possibly fairly consider Repulsion, starring Catherine Deneuve, because the template, and, although it’s pretty faithfully primarily based on the 2017 novel by Ariana Harwicz, Die My Love does share some DNA with Roman Polanski’s 1965 movie. However Ramsay doesn’t take something from that movie’s exponentially creepy construction, she attracts as a substitute on its harrowing ending, a frozen picture of its protagonist as a toddler, leaving us to mirror on the harm performed and the ugly spirit that lives in outwardly lovely individuals (to cite Shakespeare, “There’s no artwork to search out the thoughts’s building within the face”). To her credit score, Lawrence holds her personal in opposition to Deneuve, in what would possibly but show to be a profession greatest on the age of simply 34.
Pattinson generously lets her get on with it, being our avatar as his spouse self-immolates in a method that turns into fairly perversely romantic. When Jackson talks of their being collectively in a parallel world, she asks, “Are we collectively? Am I rock star? Can we f*ck?” And in a humorous method on this, the actual world, she is a rock star, and Lynne Ramsay doesn’t half-love rock stars, peppering her movie with music by Lou Reed, David Bowie (whose tune “Kooks” is used so completely you could cry) and, er, The Chipmunks. Jeff Nichols made an analogous foray into psychological sickness along with his terrific 2011 movie Take Shelter, however Die My Love goes even additional, throwing love and intercourse into the pot and stirring it to a terrific soundtrack.
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As at all times, Ramsay has a canny method of dealing with buildup and withholding catharsis, as we noticed in movies like Morvern Callar (which this maybe most resembles), We Must Discuss About Kevin and You Had been By no means Actually Right here. There’s additionally a lick of her debut, Ratcatcher, in its central premise {that a} new house is a brand new begin (spoiler, it isn’t). However Die My Love, as maddening because it typically could be, with its dream logic and dialogue, builds on the concepts expressed and genres intuited in all these earlier movies, creating one thing genuinely new, a movie of subtle contradictions that lands like The Crystals’ nonetheless unbelievably edgy 1961 pop tune “He Hit Me (and It Felt Like a Kiss).”
America is aware of very effectively how good Jennifer Lawrence could be, and this might effectively imply a fifth Oscar nomination if it lands in savvy arms. It may be the movie that takes Ramsay into the following stage of her profession. As producer Martin Scorsese effectively is aware of, she’s a genius. And now, it seems — goddammit — she will be able to sing too.
Title: Die My Love
Competition: Cannes (Competitors)
Gross sales agent: 193
Director: Lynne Ramsay
Screenwriters: Lynne Ramsay, Enda Walsh, Alice Birch
Solid: Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Pattinson, LaKeith Stanfield, Sissy Spacek, Nick Nolte
Working time: 1 hr 58 min
