Lynne Ramsay sure takes her time. It took nine years after Morvern Callar to get We Need To Talk About Kevin, another six for You Were Never Really Here, and it’s now been an eight year wait for her latest, Die My Love. Just like the last few times, it’s been worth every second. We’re on Ramsay’s fifth feature now and I truly believe she’s incapable of not making a masterpiece, this romantic psychosexual breakdown yet another staggering achievement in a career built entirely out of those, all rage and desperation and bodies, anchored by an out of this world Jennifer Lawrence performance.
Adapting the novel from Ariana Harwicz – but moving the action from rural France to an American middle of nowhere – Ramsay (along with her all-star co-writing team of Alice Birch and Enda Walsh) has Lawrence play Grace, a new mum in a very isolated house with a frequently absent manchild boyfriend; this is Jackson (Robert Pattinson). Suffering from a mix of post-partum depression/psychosis, extreme boredom, loneliness, and severe sexual frustration, Grace begins to lose her mind.
It’s a very internal plot, and Ramsay keeps us directly in Grace’s headspace from start to finish, her ever-less-reliable point of view our only lens for this world. As is her way, Ramsay makes it as compellingly horrible a place to be as possible. The soundscape here is a masterclass in distress, a cacophonous mix of insects, baby cries, grating infant-friendly songs, and the endless yapping of a dog bought by Jackson on a moronic whim. It’s so overwhelming that, when the dog finally has to die, instead of it being horrifying or distressing as it would be in any other film, it actually feels like a relief, finally one of the noises being knocked out of the rotation.
It’s moments like this that really immerse you in the mind of Grace (see also: Ramsay highlighting how maddening her lack of sex life is by styling and shooting Lawrence, who has been gorgeous in every film she’s ever done, in such a way that she’s never looked better on screen), a mind brought to life in astonishing fashion. Balancing the madness of mother!, the pure movie star glitz of her blockbuster work, and even her comedy chops, Lawrence puts in the crowning work of her career here, mesmerising and terrifying, genuinely hypnotic in her close-ups and monologues.
Pattinson gets a lot less flashy stuff to do – it’s a generous, vanity-free role for someone of his star power to take on – as the man who has, in his ignorance, built a misery machine and must now suffer the results, but he does get to be hilariously annoying as a guy who will ‘do anything’ for his wife and child except actually notice them. Meanwhile, Sissy Spacek is great value in support as Jackson’s mother Pam, the only person in the film to regularly *see* Grace, and Nick Nolte is captivating in a flashback cameo as dementia-ridden dad Harry.
Despite all the classic Ramsay abrasions, Die My Love is also a frequently beautiful thing. Though the house itself might swiftly become a prison, every exterior shot captured by Ramsay and DP Seamus McGarvey is magnificently alive and free, always painterly and surreal, while there are some incredible cuts that reminded of the all-timer editing in Claire Denis’s recent masterpiece High Life. It’s stark and bizarre, a perfect visual representation of the heightened, sometimes even hysterical tone the writing and acting reach, whether that’s Lawrence in a barking match with a dog or Pattinson getting so angry in an argument that he literally falls out of his car in fury.
Die My Love is the kind of film that gets called ‘not an easy watch’, and it is true that, in both content and form, it loves to challenge you (though it’s hardly as nasty or violent as either of her last two films). But, if you get on its wavelength, it is also, in its own dark way, viciously entertaining, an extremely well-paced and emotionally exhilarating two hours in the company of the best-looking and worst-communicating couple in the world. Eschewing literalism for pure feeling whenever it can and anchored by one of the best performances of the year, perhaps *the* best so far, Die My Love utterly gripped me from the first moment until the hammeringly powerful finale.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 