The more I read about Die My Love, the crazier it gets. Yes, the film was made and marketed as a romantic drama between Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson, two former teen heartthrobs who’ve both proceeded to make fascinating artistic choices as they’ve aged. But that only skims the surface.
Lawrence is also a producer here through her Excellent Cadaver shingle, and she made the choice to adapt the Ariana Harwicz novel on the recommendation of none other than producer Martin Goddamn Scorsese. It was Lawrence who insisted on hiring Lynne Ramsey to direct, after Ramsey’s work on the fucked-up family drama We Need To Talk About Kevin. Ramsey proceeded to co-write the script, alongside Enda Walsh (creator of that surreal Netflix stop-motion anthology The House) and Alice Birch (who wrote freaking Lady Macbeth). And in the supporting cast, we’ve got such varied and accomplished talents as LaKeith Stanfield, Nick Nolte, and Sissy Spacek.
Given the creative talent involved, what the hell have we got here? Well, to put it simply, we’ve got two solid hours of Jennifer Lawrence losing her godforsaken mind.
Respectively, Lawrence and Pattinson play Grace and Jackson, a young married couple. Jackson just inherited a run-down house out in the middle of nowhere, after his uncle died of causes I’m not recounting here. Their newlywed life in this fixer-upper house is further complicated by the birth of their son. And most of those complications stem from Grace’s crippling post-partum depression.
Due to the stress of caring for an infant — not to mention the lack of any social life in this rural backwater town — Grace is lonely and bored. I might further add that her husband is frequently out working, which doesn’t exactly help her social anxieties or her workload around the house. Grace can’t even think about restarting her career because her baby takes up the entirety of her mental/physical capacity. The days are gone when Grace and Jackson were young and carefree and they could fuck like rabbits, so now she’s sexually frustrated and struggling to feel physically attractive.
No two ways about it, Grace is a wreck. She’s a great big pile of anxieties and psychoses that manifest in all manner of ways throughout the picture.
(Side note: Not that anyone could tell, from how great she looks all throughout this picture, but Lawrence was in fact second-trimester pregnant with her second child all throughout production.)
At one point, Grace throws herself through a plate-glass window just so she can feel something. She has lurid sexual fantasies about some random guy played by LaKeith Stanfield. Huge stretches of screentime — especially in the third act — are left ambiguous because it’s nigh-impossible to tell what’s real and what’s a product of Grace’s twisted mental state.
Then there’s my personal favorite incident. Roughly half an hour in, Jackson gets the bright idea to try and cheer up his wife and son by bringing a dog home. Unfortunately, the dog turns out to be a yappy little bastard who won’t shut up, adding to the noise and high maintenance of dealing with a newborn. I’m loathe to go into spoilers, but CONTENT WARNING: the dog is dead at the halfway point.
Speaking of Jackson, his general attitude toward all this going on is to simply give his wife some space and patiently wait for her to adapt to new circumstances. Granted, that may not necessarily be the worst idea. But at some point, it’s worth wondering if this is merely a coping mechanism so that Jackson doesn’t have to do any actual work in helping out. Or maybe he’s falling back on doing nothing because he doesn’t know what the hell to do. Maybe there’s nothing he possibly can do. It’s tough to say.
Hell, even the characters most familiar with post-partum depression don’t seem to have any idea what to do. The most prominent example is Grace’s mother-in-law, played by Sissy Spacek. She can offer a sympathetic ear and not much else. Funny how being told that her condition is under-reported and common does nothing to help Grace with her own situation.
Oh, and Nick Nolte? He plays Jackson’s father. He died right about the time when the baby would’ve been born, so Nolte is only here for a couple of brief flashbacks, he’s barely worth mentioning.
Something interesting about the baby is that it’s left ambiguous as to whether or not he even has a name. At one point, Grace makes a snide remark that she and Jackson left their kid nameless, but we have to wonder whether or not she was joking, as none of the characters ever refer to her son by name. There’s only one brief time when he’s mentioned by name, but it’s one of those scenes that’s left ambiguous as to whether or not it really happened. The lack of a name further reinforces the baby’s status as baggage — he’s too young to have any personality or agency of his own, so he only exists as a strain on his mother. I expect the dog was never given a name for similar reasons.
Then we’ve got the recurring motif of nature. Grace and her mother-in-law both make a habit of sleepwalking into the neighboring woods. Grace tends to circle around on all fours like a wolf, and it’s shown to be something she and Jackson did while they were courting. There’s a prominent scene in which Grace locks herself in the bathroom and claws her fingernails on the wallpaper. Grace is constantly throwing her clothes off, even at the most inappropriate times. Her other preferred method of stress relief is to go take a walk in the woods.
In so many ways, it feels like Grace is trying to revert to a more primal state. Furthermore, it feels like Grace’s mental deterioration stems in large part from what others (read: society) expects from her. It’s like Grace can’t really feel free or happy unless she’s in the wilderness and away from the arbitrary bullshit of modern life.
But of course that would be too easy for a movie with so many scenes that may or may not be dream sequences. Like the ending. Seriously, the way the ending plays out, it’s entirely possible that Grace simply wants or needs to check out entirely and be on her own. It’s tough to guess.
Die My Love doesn’t really work as a coherent or compelling narrative, but it does serve as a harrowing portrait of post-partum depression. I know this is nothing new for Jennifer Lawrence (mother!, anyone?), but I really do admire her full-on commitment to playing a hellish mental/emotional downward spiral with such fearless abandon. Unfortunately, the film is so laser-focused on Lawrence’s portrayal of the subject that there’s not much else here worth recommending. Stanfield, Spacek, and Nolte all could’ve been replaced with other actors and it wouldn’t have made a difference. Hell, even Pattinson doesn’t get a lot of room to make an impression.
This is very much a film for the arthouse crowd. The cinema nerds will have a lot of fun dissecting this to interpret the various themes and figure out which scenes really happened and to what extent. Unfortunately, the film was so little fun to sit through that I have a hard time recommending it for anyone else.