It is hard to describe the slightly unhinged quality that pervades Die My Love (directed by Lynne Ramsay). The plot is as sparse as the landscape, which is full of wide-open fields, wild grass rustling in the wind (often shot in the muted grays of twilight), dilapidated buildings that arise seemingly out of nowhere, desolate highways, and dense forest (which will prove fatefully important by the end of the story). A young couple moves to the wilderness of Montana, near where the man, Jackson (Robert Pattinson), grew up. They have a baby. The woman, Grace (Jennifer Lawrence), unravels psychologically in her maternal isolation, until she becomes an unbearable threat to herself and their domestic harmony. The story is told out of sequence, largely in flashbacks, sometimes in dream sequences. It is sometimes hard to tell whether something is happening in reality or only in Grace’s mind. Often our only clue to the order of events is the age of the baby.
The movie is held together by the electric wire of Jennifer Lawrence’s performance, which is so intensely embodied it is both exhilarating and unsettling. She crouches, prowls, growls, flops, spins, spits, rages, floats, and screams her way through the long, terrifying loneliness of caring for a newborn all alone day after day. We know very little about Grace before this wilderness experience. We learn that she was, or wanted to be, a writer, but we never see her writing. We don’t know where she and Jackson met, where they lived before they moved into his dead uncle’s house, or why she agreed to this self-imposed isolation. We don’t know what Jackson does all day, except that he works long hours, sometimes travels, and keeps replenishing the condom box in the dashboard of his truck. None of this does much to comfort Grace in her distress.
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The movie is largely interpreted as a first-person dive into postpartum depression. While it is true that the birth of her child seems to precipitate her descent, Grace’s discontent seems to run deeper. It is as though she intuited an invisible straitjacket of maternal expectations that was wrapped tightly around her the moment she gave birth, and she is desperate to shake it off through whatever acts of erratic violence and ecstasy it takes.
All she had to do, really, was turn on her TV or go to a movie theater to see just how dismal the state of motherhood in popular culture has become. Linda (Rose Byrne) in the movie If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (directed by Mary Bronstein and released only a few weeks before Die My Love) has made it past the baby years, but things have not improved for her sense of well-being. Largely abandoned by her workaholic husband, she works full time as a therapist while also caring for their daughter, who is suffering from a mysterious illness.
When their bathroom collapses into their living room, they move into a shabby motel, but otherwise the relentless grind of Linda’s life persists. When she is late for a family therapy session, she is berated for her lack of commitment. None of these circumstances—the exhaustion of caring for her child, her emotionally demanding job, temporary housing, an absentee partner—mitigate the moral expectations placed on her as a mother. It is no wonder she turns to recreational drugs and begins to hallucinate.
Over in TV land, the characters in the star-studded All Her Fault (streaming on Peacock), based on the bestselling novel by Andrea Mara, live decidedly glossier lives, but the maternal despair is just as stark. Packing a year’s worth of plot twists into eight nail-biting episodes, the show is a high-end soap opera with kidnapping, mistaken identity, suspicions of infidelity, generational trauma, addiction, and the special ennui that comes from having too much money.
But under the layers of beige fabrics and behind the shine of ceiling-to-floor windows overlooking private pools, the knives are out for the moms. Marissa (Sarah Snook) and Jenny (Dakota Fanning) both work long hours and rely on nannies and other moms to cover as much child care as possible. Both are married to men who never imagine that any of this domestic labor should fall on their shoulders. When Jenny’s nanny kidnaps Marissa’s son for mysterious reasons, we don’t have to wonder if the dads will bear any responsibility in the recriminations that follow. The title of the show says it all.
Jenny and Marissa suffer with quiet forbearance that is a mark of their privilege. Clinging more precariously to the professional middle class, Linda doesn’t have enough domestic help to suffer so gracefully. But all of these women seem to accept that being overworked, underappreciated, and socially shamed for nurturing even a sliver of their minds uncolonized by the unrelenting demands of parenthood is simply the lot of middle-class mothers in our society. They can kick against the pricks, but in the end they all accept their bridles.
If this is what awaits Grace in Die My Love, it is no wonder she refuses to participate. There are no soap operatic distractions in Grace’s life, no tired cliches about work-life balance. There is no frantic rushing from work call to ballet class. No mommy groups are there to support or shame her. Even in her isolated house in the middle of nowhere, however, she is expected to surrender her will, her body, and her inner life entirely to solitary mothering. The absence of these other trappings gives the story the quality of a fairytale.
And like a fairytale witch who rejects the expectations of her cruel circumstances, Grace does not suffer gracefully. She is erratic and petulant and often deeply unsympathetic. But this is at least in part because we have been told so many times that maternal suffering is a moral imperative. It is difficult to watch someone refuse that narrative—which is probably why I couldn’t tear my eyes away.
