Review: Jennifer Lawrence's raw, unbound performance in Die My Love leaps from the screen

Filmmaker Lynne Ramsey has a knack for extracting peerless performances from actors, from Samantha Morton and Kathleen McDermott in Morvern Callar, to Tilda Swinton in We Need to Talk About Kevin, to Joaquin Phoenix in You Were Never Really Here.

Her latest film, Die My Love, pairs her with an unforgettable Jennifer Lawrence, whose raw, unbound performance leaps from the screen. Adapting Ariana Harwicz’s Spanish-language novel Matate amor alongside Enda Walsh and Alice Birch, Ramsey funnels a kaleidoscope of emotion and deterioration through Lawrence’s masterful performance.

Lawrence stars as Grace, the kind of indelibly compelling woman who entrances all who meet her. She’s sexy and fun and interesting, a writer from New York who follows her husband, Jackson (Robert Pattinson), to his home in rural Montana. Though Grace and Jackson can’t keep their hands off each other, their relocation immediately seems like a bad idea. Never mind the house they’re moving into is a fixer-upper where Jackson’s uncle committed suicide, it’s more about how Jackson moved his exciting, cool wife to the middle of nowhere and essentially abandons her there.

To be fair, they have a baby, and he needs to work to provide, and work takes him far from home for longer and longer stretches, as it can do in rural areas where good jobs are scarce. But Grace is clearly overwhelmed by motherhood, floundering in post-partum depression, and maybe also life-sized regret over moving to Montana. Grace’s mental state is reflected in Ramsey’s filmmaking, which makes reality and Grace’s perception indistinguishable. Cinematographer Seamus McGarvey utilizes a boxy 4:3 aspect ratio which is both claustrophobic and makes the whole film look like a demented home movie, an impression aided by the grain of 35mm film.

A wild horse only becomes real when Jackson’s car collides with it, a handsome man (LaKeith Stanfield) with whom Grace has an affair might be purely a figment of her imagination, or perhaps a neighbor she fantasizes about, or maybe he’s also desperate for connection in the Montana wilds. Reality and Grace’s imagination are blurred, her psychosis increases but nothing about her perception changes. Is it the baby, Montana, loneliness, or was she always mad? Or maybe she’s not mad at all, maybe she’s just married to a dipsh-t and stuck in a boring, dead-end life.

It's not clear how old Grace and Jackson are, but they seem younger than the 30-something Lawrence and Pattinson. Certainly, they seem young enough to confuse good sex with intimacy, and their relationship is essentially slaughtered by the actual challenges of marriage and parenthood. Grace says, “We need a cat” and Jackson brings home a dog—a sh-tty one, the worst movie dog seen in ages—he’s so out of step with his wife’s needs. But there are glimpses of real concern, moments when the “real” Jackson seems to poke through Grace’s increasingly bitter perspective, and we can see genuine fear on his face as he observes his wife’s erratic behavior. And his mother, Pam (a deeply empathetic Sissy Spacek), certainly recognizes the warning signs flashing around Grace, but she is a freight train chugging to an inevitable conclusion.

Die My Love isn’t funny, but it’s not not funny, either. There’s something so predictably jaded about Grace, and she seems aware of her own deterioration and embraces her descent because at least it’s something to do. She can’t play along with the polite social games of Jackson’s childhood friends, everyone else seems more interested in her child than she is, and her creative spark is gone, crushed by motherhood. Her baby is sucking her dry, literally and metaphorically, and she’s aware enough to know what is happening to her. It all seemed so inevitable—good sex, get married, have a baby. But once she’s there, none of it satisfies her. Is she monstrous? Or just honest enough to admit that motherhood will never be the end-all, be-all of her existence? She can’t make herself fit into the mother shape, so she becomes feral, a snarling scratching wildcat searching for escape.

Die My Love is a challenging, even alienating film. The question underpinning Grace’s experience is Was this all a mistake? Certainly, marrying Jackson was a mistake, he’s a boy who wanted a hot wife yet has no clue how to emotionally support, let alone nurture, an actual woman. But the baby, was the baby a mistake? It’s not a question Grace nor any other woman can ask aloud (as if sensing Grace’s personal doubts, one of the smiling Montana moms tentatively confesses that having two kids is harder than she expected, but she backs down from her own truth as soon as she glances at it). It makes for an interesting companion piece to We Need to Talk About Kevin, another portrait of maternal frustration.

Die My Love offers no answers nor even a definitive conclusion. There are only Grace’s depression and despair, twin flames in an inferno slowly consuming her, and the question she dares not ask aloud. Was this all a mistake?

Die My Love will play exclusively in theaters from November 7, 2025.