MUBI
There’s a longstanding truism that horror movies make the best date movies: something about blood makes young people want to rip each other’s clothes off.
Die My Love has all the ingredients of a horror movie.
Young people do in fact rip each other’s clothes off. It’s not short on blood or jump scares. But I wouldn’t recommend it for a hot date unless your partner gets turned on by post-partum psychosis.
Because that’s where we are in this movie. That’s the nightmare.
It even starts with a classic horror trope: a couple moves into a crumbling old country house he inherited from an uncle who committed suicide. Jackson (Robert Pattinson) is going to fix the place up while Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) writes a book. They’re having a baby. Cue the rats behind the walls.
But we’re not in Amityville. Director Lynne Ramsay is going a step beyond her psychological thriller We Need to Talk About Kevin—beyond even the surreal terror of its source novel by Ariana Harwicz—into Grace’s increasingly warped perceptions, a world where nothing seems real and everything is lethal.
For two hours we are trapped inside Grace’s mind as she disintegrates.
Even fans of Die My Love have a hard time agreeing how we ought to experience what the movie shows us. How much is real and how much is Grace’s madness? Events are presented as objectively happening—meatily, viscerally real—only for later scenes to leave us wondering if Grace’s brain is playing tricks on us.
A lot of films intentionally blur the edges of reality, and most of them eventually clear up the crazy in some tried-and-true fashion: she’s hallucinating; she’s dying/already dead; it was all a dream. Die My Love hints at each one but ultimately places them all out of reach. Ramsay isn’t taking the easy way out.
Which can be an easy way to lose your audience. Even the most cryptic film by the most enigmatic director usually leaves us some way to find our footing. The Shining leads us into rooms that can’t possibly exist in physical space, but discovering that is actually our way out of Kubrick’s labyrinth: once we know he’s toying with us, the game is up. Even David Lynch’s Mullholland Drive scatters clues to what’s really holding its fragmented delusions together.
Ramsay has said in interviews that she doesn’t want us to know what’s real and what’s not in her movie. It’s not the point. The point, she says, is what Grace sees.
What Grace sees casts an oddly feral light on its rural setting. Early on we find her crawling through the tall grass like a cat, touching herself as she presses her back against the soil. She’s comfortable in the wild. It’s playing house with Jackson that brings her despair to a boil.
Our first hints are subtle. She swears she can hear their baby cry and he swears he can’t. One night she finds him more interested in his telescope than in her. He muses about the possibility of infinite universes and she pointedly asks if they still fuck in those other universes. Tired of the way he keeps tuning her out, she jokes that the baby’s stopped breathing. Jackson laughs it off but let’s face it, it’s a messed-up way to get somebody’s attention.
These can all be written off as Grace being Grace, and for a while that’s what everyone does. Only her mother-in-law Pam (Sissy Spacek, agelessly waifish), who sleepwalks with a shotgun since her husband died, sees through Grace’s dark jokes to the real breakdown that’s happening inside. It seems she’s been there.
Grace’s tragedy is that she doesn’t see how anyone could know what’s happening inside her, particularly since she doesn’t know herself. A family friend tries to be helpful, noting that nobody ever talks about how hard it is to be a parent.
“That’s all anybody ever talks about,” she replies. Grace is nothing if not quick on the draw.
But Die My Love is not a Lifetime movie about erasing the stigma of post-partum depression. Grace’s battle isn’t brain chemistry but the need to express something she can’t get out of her. After a late-night feeding, in a moment of quiet frustration, she scatters ink on the blank page of the novel she can’t write. A drop of milk from her still-bare breast falls, mixing with the ink. The irony of that blending—she can create a life but she can’t create her story—is the movie’s emotional apex.
But we’re only a third of the way through, and Grace still has a lot more falling apart to do. She’s shown to us as a trapped animal, and we’re meant to see that as a metaphor. But then actual animals start getting hurt.
Jackson and Grace are arguing on a drive down a back road. She’s found condoms in his glove compartment—he swears they’re not his—and she’s blowing one up like a balloon when he gets distracted and hits a horse.
The horse staggers off. There’s blood on the front grille of the truck and we later see Jackson hosing it off. For the rest of the movie, the truck has a busted headlight. Even so, you can’t feel wholly convinced that any of this really happened. Not because of the moment itself—it’s a brutal shock—but because of the way Jackson and Grace treat it as a thing of no consequence. Who stands there and watches a wounded horse limp away in pain?
Still, we know something happened, because the dog is in the car. The dog that Jackson brought Grace for company, the dog she doesn’t want because it won’t stop barking. Day or night. Nobody seems to care about the barking but her, and it’s driving her (and us) up the wall. The dog is injured in the collision, and now it’s not just barking but howling in pain.
Jackson says he’ll take the dog to the vet in the morning; Grace says that means the dog will just die slower. Late that night she steals Pam’s shotgun and shoots it in the yard.
Was this mercy or was she just sick of the barking? That door to Grace’s heart is never opened.
It’s hard not to hate Grace in this moment, but it does seem like she and the dog have something in common. They’re both in mortal agony and nobody’s listening. It should be just as easy for us to hate Jackson for being so clueless and distant (and yes, Jackson, about those condoms). But Pattinson doesn’t play him like a cad. More like someone who keeps reaching for ways to fix Grace but can’t because he doesn’t know what’s broken.
He tries everything that should work. A trip to the beach. A birthday party with friends. He even offers to marry her, and the wedding seems to lift her spirits until the moment they fight, he wanders off, and she has a meltdown alone in the bridal suite. So he has her committed—the ultimate fix—and this is where we get our only real clue about what might be going on with Grace.
She tells her shrink that her parents both died in a plane crash when she was very young. He suggests that her abandonment issues may have made it impossible for her to bond with her baby. She replies that she can bond with her baby just fine: it’s the rest of the universe that’s fucked up.
Lawrence does not play this as a breakthrough moment, because it’s not. Maybe her parents really did die in a plane crash, or maybe it’s just the kind of thing you tell your shrink so he’ll stop trying to figure you out. As for bonding with her son… she keeps him glued to her but rarely shows visible affection. She’ll push him for miles in a stroller but never checks to see if he’s all right. And yet she’s threatened by anyone else who tries to get close to him. She’s not so much attached to him as holding on.
We rarely know what’s true or false in Graceland, but some moments are more fantastical than others. One of these is in deep spoiler territory. The other involves a helmeted motorcyclist who keeps driving past her. She eventually un-helmets him, cuts his lip, then kisses his bloody mouth. There’s a fairly raw scene of them having sex. The man is pure danger, hunger, everything Jackson isn’t.
But when she later meets him and his family in a grocery store parking lot, he seems about as dangerous as a brick of Top Ramen. Either he doesn’t know who the hell she is or he’s doing a very good job pretending.
Both Ramsay and Lawrence admit that they don’t know whether Grace’s tryst with the motorcyclist actually happened. This is meant to build a mystery, but honestly, it’s when the whole game seemed to lose its point. If the question is unknowable and the answer doesn’t matter, then why are we watching?
Whether Grace’s journey ends in destruction or freedom—or both at once—is ambiguous and ultimately unimportant. The real reason to hang in with Die My Love isn’t what happens to Grace. It’s what’s going on with Jennifer Lawrence.
This may be Lawrence’s best performance, playing hard against her plucky-tomboy persona. She’s most terrifying not when she self-harms (although this is hard watching), but when she’s trying to convince people that it’s great, she’s all better now. It’s hard to separate fiction from real life here as well, because Lawrence can’t.
Lawrence admits in interviews that, like Grace, she’s experienced post-partum depression. Other women who’ve suffered it talk about the same sense of unreality, the total lack of boundaries or defenses, that she exhibits as Grace. It certainly feels real. She’s got that sardonic edge that depressed people wield against the dark. Even when she’s emotionally deadened, she pulls the light toward her. She is utterly exposed.
Lawrence also seems determined to expose her actual flesh to us, and this too was likely inspired by real events. She’s spoken publicly about her humiliation when leaked nudes of her were posted across the Internet. By her own account, she insisted on nudity in Mother!, Red Sparrow, and No Hard Feelings as a way to retake control of her body—evolving from humiliation to empowerment to broad comedy.
In Die My Love, she wears her naked skin like a wolf wears its pelt: it’s as close to armor as Grace has. It’s when she’s forced to dress like a normal happy person that she becomes defenseless: in one scene, Jackson demands she put on her shorts even though it’s just the two of them at home; later, she strips to her underwear to swim at a pool party.
There’s a long movie tradition of women whose self-destruction is wound up in eros. Most of these—Splendor in the Grass, Sophie’s Choice, Betty Blue—look at the woman incinerated by shame and desire from the outside; that is, from a man’s perspective. From his vantage, the woman is both victim and vampire.
Die My Love’s saving grace (forgive the pun) is that, by showing how it feels to be inside that madness, we no longer see her as someone to be saved or cast out. She doesn’t want to be saved; she insists on being cast out. Like an animal chewing its leg out of a trap, she will leave bloody and maimed. But she will leave.
Watching someone choose this path is a deeper terror than any slasher film can muster. But to be inside that choice, with Grace, is where Ramsay wants us. Grace’s determination to choose—at the cost of her family, her sanity, even her life—is the movie’s true horror; but it is also the one undisputably true thing about her.
