"Die My Love" feels like what happens when a mind refuses to stay quiet, instead acting out every carnal/primal thought we would normally keep buried beneath the "image" of us.
From the first minutes, the film feels less like a beginning and more like something breaking open — a woman already off-balance, already fraying, already carrying something she can’t name. Ramsay drops us into that psychic weather without orientation, refusing to ease us in; we’re yanked into a kaleidoscope of raw emotions funneled through the lens of a woman unmoored by motherhood, post-natal depression, and... life.
Grace is not presented as “broken,” or as a case study in anything. She’s portrayed the way internal chaos really feels: lurching, private, contradictory, relentless. Jennifer Lawrence plays her as if every breath is an argument with her own body. There’s a restlessness to her that never settles — she paces rooms like she’s trying to outrun her own thoughts, she sits in silence as if silence itself has teeth. Ramsay shoots these moments with a kind of nervous intimacy, the camera refusing to grant her distance or dignity, because she’s lost those long before the film begins.
It was impossible to shake how the film treats Grace’s reality as something unstable, but not fantastical. The hallucinations, the fantasies, the sudden surges of violence — they don’t feel like genre embellishments. They feel like emotional logic. She’s responding to a world that has become too sharp, too loud, too close. Ramsay lets those fractures bleed into the form: time curls in on itself, memories smuggle themselves into the present, and scenes dissolve just as you think you’ve caught your footing. It’s messy in the way the mind is messy — not constructed, but leaking.
Her marriage to Jackson is the slow, suffocating kind of tragedy where two people orbit each other without ever touching ground. Pattinson plays him as a man who thinks presence should be enough, and it isn’t. Their house becomes this eerie halfway space between intimacy and estrangement — a place where love should live but instead grows mold and contempt.
And then Grace keeps slipping: into the fantasies, into the notion of self-harm, into the strange electric pull toward the motorbike rider who appears like a half-remembered fever dream to help her find that missing piece of herself. Ramsay never confirms what he is — desire, projection, escape, delusion — and the ambiguity becomes part of the character’s language. Grace wants to feel alive, but everything that promises life seems to threaten her further.
What the film captures, maybe better than anything else Ramsay has made, is how motherhood becomes a prism that distorts everything around it. Expectations, guilt, the violence of tenderness, the heartache of unconditional love, the fear of never being “enough,” the thought that you will never be you again because now you are a mother— all of it churns inside Grace until there’s no separation between the personal and the primal. This film isn’t about diagnosis. It’s about the terrifying intimacy of a mind that can’t quiet itself once a child enters the world, both for good and for worse.
I didn’t walk away from Die My Love feeling “moved.” I walked away feeling scratched-raw, from the inside out. There’s beauty in it — Lawrence carries whole galaxies of feeling behind the disorientation — but the beauty cuts, because the film refuses to give any coherent boundary between pain and identity. Ramsay never resolves the chaos because chaos is the point. Grace isn’t healed. She isn’t “understood.” She exists in this painful, lucid middle ground where survival feels like both a triumph and a punishment.
The film lingers because it doesn’t pretend that motherhood, love, or sanity are tidy. It lingers because it shows a woman clawing at the edges of her own life, desperate to feel control over something, even if it’s only the sharpness of a knife in her palm or the rush of a fantasy she knows might not be real. It lingers because Ramsay understands that sometimes the most frightening place a character can be trapped is in her own head.
This is a difficult film — jagged, sensory, feverish — but it stays with you. Not as a message. Not as a moral. As a feeling you can’t quite shake, the kind that flickers back when the room goes quiet.
7.7/10
Sidenote: My least favourite Ramsay film simply because it's incredibly hard to digest, and not something I will likely rewatch, but DAMN how I have missed her work. Good to have her back.
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