Die My Love, Lynne Ramsay’s fifth film, ends with a familiar song sung by an unfamiliar voice: The director herself delivers a stripped-down version of Joy Division’s 1980 hit “Love Will Tear Us Apart.” Marital-breakdown songs are usually the stuff of country and western, but this stark post-punk anthem was written by Manchester’s Ian Curtis, who married at 19 in 1975 and was dead, by suicide, a month before his most famous song was released, 45 years ago, almost to the day (if you’re reading this during Cannes 2025). Ramsay’s mesmerizing film is as close as you might get to seeing Curtis’ song come to life, the brutal but beautiful story of a married woman’s mental disintegration as post-natal depression consumes and obliterates her.
The famous saying has it that hell is other people, but here, hell for other people is Grace (Jennifer Lawrence), a big-city author who has moved to the middle of nowhere to be close to the family of her husband Jackson (Robert Pattinson). Jackson has inherited his uncle’s house, miles from the nearest neighbor but within walking distance of his mother Pam (Sissy Spacek). They have big plans; they want to recharge their batteries and create. “It’s nothing like New York here,” Jackson tells Grace, with a great deal of understatement, and the film covers their first year there in under 10 minutes, as they make violent love, have a child and celebrate his first birthday.
The dark screen that starts the film is an indication of where we are, a great, black void accompanied by the buzzing of a fly, a sound that returns intermittently and, with the magic of Dolby Atmos, even seems to ricochet round the auditorium. Grace and Jackson are miles from anywhere, and their isolation is emphasized when Jackson looks up to the sky through a telescope, looking at the crowded canvas that is the sky. He talks excitedly about parallel worlds and infinite possibilities, but Grace shuts him down. “Am I boring you?” he asks. “Not you, baby, the universe” she replies. “Who gives a shit?”
This is the first inkling that Grace might be on another planet, but for the time being it’s possible that she’s just a wiseacre Manhattanite coming to terms with life in the sticks. A trip to the supermarket with baby Harry seems to bear this out, with a combative exchange at the till. “Found everything you’re looking for?” asks the impossibly perky cashier. “In life?” Grace snorts, and the scathing takedown that follows the poor girl’s attempts at small talk is uncomfortable to watch.
By this point, Grace has become a stay-at-home mom; Jackson is off doing whatever he does (there’s a vague suggestion that he’s a musician, with a day job that pays the wages), leaving Grace alone with the baby. Ramsay portrays this capture in a disturbing sequence set to Toni Basil’s “Mickey,” in which Lawrence makes grotesque shapes, compulsively uttering the phrase “All righty.” But Grace is not a domestic goddess, and her disinterest in housekeeping is further underlined when Jackson comes home with a dog (“We need a cat,” she says). The dog quickly becomes a key element of the story, its incessant barking, like the buzzing of the fly and the crying of the baby, woven into the unnerving soundscape (like You Were Never Really Here, there’s a lot happening aurally).
The first person to really pick up on what’s happening with Grace is her mother-in-law Pam, still grieving for her late, Alzheimer’s-afflicted husband (Nick Nolte), whose shirts she irons six months after his death. “Everybody goes a little loopy the first year,” Pam tells her, but Grace resents the inference of post-natal depression. Nevertheless, there’s no doubt something is wrong, as Grace becomes destructive, self-sabotaging and becomes strangely infatuated with a motorcyclist (LaKeith Stanfield) that she may or may not be having an affair with. An attempt to patch things up by getting married makes things even worse, leading to what’s arguably the film’s most unexpected and genuinely shocking scene.
One might reasonably think of Repulsion, starring Catherine Deneuve, as the template, and, though it’s fairly faithfully based on the 2017 novel by Ariana Harwicz, Die My Love does share some DNA with Roman Polanski’s film. But Ramsay doesn’t take anything from that film’s exponentially creepy structure, she draws instead on its harrowing ending, a frozen image of its protagonist as a child, leaving us to reflect on the damage done and the ugly spirit that lives in outwardly beautiful people (to quote Shakespeare, “There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face”). To her credit, Lawrence holds her own against Deneuve, in what might yet prove to be a career best at the age of just 34.
Pattinson generously lets her get on with it, being our avatar as his wife self-immolates in a way that becomes quite perversely romantic. When Jackson talks of their being together in a parallel world, she asks, “Are we together? Am I rock star? Do we f*ck?” And in a funny way in this, the real world, she is a rock star, and Lynne Ramsay doesn’t half love rock stars, peppering her film with music by Lou Reed, David Bowie (whose song “Kooks” is used so perfectly you may cry) and, er, The Chipmunks. Jeff Nichols made a similar foray into mental illness with his terrific 2011 film Take Shelter, but Die, My Love goes even further, throwing love and sex into the pot and stirring it to a terrific soundtrack.
As always, Ramsay has a canny way of handling build-up and withholding catharsis, as we saw in films like Morvern Callar (which this perhaps most resembles), We Need to Talk About Kevin and You Were Never Really Here. There’s also a lick of her debut, Ratcatcher, in its central premise that a new home is a new start (spoiler, it isn’t). But Die, My Love, as maddening as it sometimes can be, with its dream logic and dialogue, builds on the ideas expressed and genres intuited in all those previous films, creating something genuinely new, a film of sophisticated contradictions that lands like The Crystals’ still unbelievably edgy 1961 pop song “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)”.
America knows very well how good Jennifer Lawrence can be, and this could well mean a fifth Oscar nomination if it lands in savvy hands. It could also be the film that takes Ramsay into the next stage of her career. As producer Martin Scorsese well knows, she’s a genius. And now, it turns out — goddammit — she can sing too.
Title: Die My LoveFestival: Cannes (Competition)Sales agent: 193Director: Lynne RamsayScreenwriters: Lynne Ramsay, Enda Walsh, Alice BirchCast: Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Pattinson, LaKeith Stanfield, Sissy Spacek, Nick NolteRunning time: 1 hr 58 min
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