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.
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.
