Die My Love Review: Mommy Weariest

Tradwives may rule a uniquely hellish pocket of the internet, but in arthouse film at least, Grim Mommy is ascendant, with an emerging canon presenting a more clear-eyed portrait of women buckling under domestic stress – in last year’s Nightbitch, this fall’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, and now Lynne Ramsay’s hallucinatory picture of postpartum depression, Die My Love. It’s Ramsay’s first film in eight years (following 2017’s You Were Never Really Here), only her fifth altogether, and quintessential Ramsay in its spare but heady vision. Profoundly interior but averse to the usual tricks that unlock a character stuck in her head, there’s no inner monologue here and no pretty speeches – just an unblinking lens on a new mom going crackers. 

That’s a flippant way to describe a far more nuanced evolution for Grace (Jennifer Lawrence), who we meet briefly pre-baby, when she and her partner Jackson (Robert Pattinson) move into their rural, ramshackle new home, inherited from an uncle who we come to learn killed himself. The scene is significant for establishing a baseline – this is Grace before she becomes a mother – and it signals early that this is not a woman who feels compelled to reassure her partner, or indulge in niceties and chitchat with the womenfolk in his family, and that she is alive to sensation, from drinking and dancing to fucking on the floor of her new living room. 

Grace, post-baby, is all of that still, only dialed up incrementally from simmer to a boil. (Still, it’s a pretty quick boil to get her crawling through tall grass on all fours with a butcher knife.) Adapting Argentinian author Ariana Harwicz’s 2012 debut novel, Ramsay and co-screenwriters Enda Walsh and Alice Birch aren’t overly invested in plot points, but that feels true to Grace’s isolated existence and the mind-numbing sameness to her days. Her self-definitions are leaking away: A sexual being, she’s been repeatedly rejected by Jackson since giving birth; a writer by trade, she’s been creatively blocked since the baby. The latter point Ramsay underscores in a visual metaphor – an uncharacteristically clunky one for Ramsay, an inspired stylist – that sees a zoned out Grace splatter ink on a blank page, then drip her breast milk on top, distorting and overtaking the ink. For a far more rattling visualization of Grace’s identity erasure, the film tips its hat to proto-feminist short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”: In a fit, Grace destroys the bathroom wallpaper, shredding her finger pads in the process. Bandages topping all her digits, obscuring her fingerprints, it’s a potent précis of Grace’s loss of self. 

Still, at just under two hours, Die My Love is a lot of movie with not a lot of story. Good thing, then, that it centers Lawrence in very nearly every frame. It’s a nervy, ferocious performance, so dominant it renders Pattinson, another certified movie star, almost comically impotent as her hapless husband. Part of a lineage of Ramsay leads who refuse to ingratiate themselves – see also: Samantha Morton in Morvern Callar, Tilda Swinton in We Need to Talk About Kevin – Lawrence goes to some pretty dark places in her full-bodied rejection of domestic expectations. You’ll follow her there unquestioningly, just for the thrill of watching her set fire to everything around her.

This article appears in November 7 • 2025.