A description is insufficient to describe some movies, and “Die My Love,” directed by Lynne Ramsay, is one of them. A young couple, Grace and Jackson, move to a house in the woods. They have a baby, and in the midst of fierce postpartum depression, Grace starts to lose her grasp on reality — or, some might argue, regain it. That’s the plot.
But you might as well describe Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” as “just some guy screaming”: not wrong, exactly, but totally missing the point. “Die My Love” is linear yet allusive; sometimes you’re not sure how much time has passed, and sometimes it passes in a blink. Submerged in Grace’s overheated, claustrophobic, tedious, maddening reality, we are drowning, just like her. It is full-body immersion cinema.
Its story may revolve around Grace, but “Die My Love” revolves around Jennifer Lawrence, for whom this feels like a career-defining role — not that she really required one. Lawrence has been a force for 15 years, but she dropped out of sight for a while and has been testing her range lately, first with the beautifully understated drama “Causeway” and then the bouncier sex comedy “No Hard Feelings.”
“Die My Love” is something else altogether. You’ve seen woman-on-the-verge roles; you’ve even seen Lawrence in them. (There’s one scene in particular in “Die My Love” that recalled “Mother!” just for a second, and I had to chuckle.) But those movies tend to make us observers of a sane woman going crazy. It’s true that this movie makes us wonder early on if Grace is seeing things — the biker (LaKeith Stanfield), for instance, who keeps speeding past the house. But in this case, Grace is already a live wire when we meet her. She’s like the earth and fire elements got stirred together and molded into a woman. You can almost believe she’d be kind of erratic whether or not her hormones were raging. She’s neither sane nor crazy: She’s just Grace, and that’s what she’s like.
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