Writers: Lynne Ramsey, Enda Walsh and Alice Birch
Director: Lynne Ramsey
No children, dogs or hoses were harmed in the making oof Lynne Ramsey’s new film Die My Love based on the novel by Ariana Harwicz about postpartum depression. Screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2025 and starring Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson, this unusual film takes an immersive approach to presenting a young mother’s growing sense of dislocation from the family and homelife around her, presenting her increasing trauma and its deleterious effects on her relationship in stark terms. But in alienating the viewer from Grace’s pain, it is hard to feel much empathy for her cold detachment.
Grace and Jackson are wild about one another, moving into a dilapidated family home in the countryside where they will raise their son. But Grace quickly becomes frustrated and bored, alone all day and unable to pursue her career as a writer, starting to withdraw into a fantasy life. But when things start to get dangerous with Grace harming herself and wandering off with the baby for hours, Jackson intervenes.
Ramsey’s film, co-written with Enda Walsh and Alice Birch, is very clear that the bond between mother and child is not the subject and in fact maintains Grace’s protection and caring gentleness with the unnamed baby throughout, and there is no hint of neglect, abandonment, harm or any of the cliches that affect presentations of post-natal depression. Grace’s issue is with herself, her partner and the domestic limitations of their life, a desire to tear it up, cause chaos and return to some of the physical and sexual spontaneity of their early relationship.
This is all told from Grace’s perspective with close-ups of her face that track her changing moods and behaviours, her complete disengagement from the woman she used to be – although Die My Love makes some case for her lack of restraint showing her pushing back against expectations as a mother. And while some of those behaviours are alarming and even funny, especially during a smug party for local families where Grace refuses to play the game, the audience often see Grace’s behaviour as unreasonable rather than beyond her control and it makes it hard to feel for her as things get worse.
Lawrence is excellent as ever as someone retreating and acting out, and much of the film is carried in her wordless responses, and her facial retorts show Grace checking out, building up to excessive reactions. Pattinson gets a fairly raw deal, and Jackson is so muted that the actor has relatively little to work with. Absent for lots of the film, it is only later that he takes charge but there’s little sense of the man, fears for his child’s safety and what he feels about the woman he loves beyond bewilderment.
It is an important story to tell but Die My Love is sometimes indulgent – are so many nude scenes necessary, do we need to see quite so much of the couple mooning around the house or in cars – and sometimes overwhelmingly noisy with loud music, the baby crying and a dog barking for much of the first 30-minutes so it’s no surprise that Grace feels the same. But the film spends too much time enjoying Grace’s behaviour and never fully lets us or her understand it.
Die My Love is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2025 from 8-19 October.
