Die My Love

Translated by Martina Marino

For this article, I conducted an experiment: I asked some friends for a topic and, without knowing absolutely anything about the film or its director, I ventured into gathering information—contradictory or not. Today we’re talking about: Die My Love by Lynne Ramsay.

Scottish, born in 1969, trained between photography and visual arts, Ramsay established herself from her feature debut Ratcatcher (1999) as one of the most radical authors in contemporary European cinema: a poetics of bodies and debris, of traumas never spoken yet inscribed in objects, of childlike or disturbed points of view that distort reality. With Morvern Callar, We Need to Talk About Kevin, and You Were Never Really Here, she consolidated an elliptical, sensory style capable of holding together lyricism and brutality, social peripheries and psychological devastation.

Premiering in competition at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival—met with a nine-minute standing ovation and quietly booed by part of the audience and critics—Die My Love will arrive in Italian cinemas on November 27, 2025, distributed by MUBI. Also produced under the aegis of Martin Scorsese and based on Ariana Harwicz’s novel Crève, mon amour (first published in 2012), it is already one of the year’s most controversial titles: for some, a feral and necessary portrait of postpartum depression; for others, a stylistic exercise that mistakes an accumulation of outbursts for psychological depth.

At the center of the film are Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson. She is not only the protagonist but also a producer; he plays a disoriented husband in a rural America that functions simultaneously as social realism and mental landscape.

The plot is entirely linear: Grace and Jackson leave New York to move into an isolated house in Montana that belonged to his uncle, who died by suicide. It is yet another “house to fix up” of contemporary cinema, but here the renovation concerns more than roofs, pipes, and window frames. He once wanted to play in a band; she wanted to write the “great American novel.” Pregnancy and the birth of their child shift every axis: Jackson takes a manual job that often keeps him away, while Grace remains alone with the newborn, overwhelmed by unsolicited advice from mothers, aunts, and grandmothers, and by a mother-in-law, Pam—played by Sissy Spacek—who is herself dealing with grief and psychological instability.

The house becomes a trap. Isolation turns into claustrophobia. What was supposed to be a “new beginning” slowly slips into something that, depending on whom you ask, is called postpartum depression, bipolar disorder, undiagnosed psychosis, or pure emotional anarchy. In the midst of this, a motorcyclist who rides past the house enters the story—a figure onto whom the protagonist projects fantasies and desires: perhaps he exists, perhaps he doesn’t, but the film makes no effort to clarify the difference.

Some Italian outlets have read Die My Love as a form of maternal body horror: Grace’s body—caught between compulsive sexuality, disgust, extreme exhaustion, and rejection of her child—becomes the surface on which Ramsay etches the silent violence of the everyday. One of the studios behind The Substance, another major title of recent cinema, was also involved in the film’s production.

The director works in continuity with We Need to Talk About Kevin and You Were Never Really Here: dysfunctional relationships, family trauma, distorted subjectivities. Here she pushes the sensory dimension even further. The 1.33:1 format compresses the frame vertically, brings faces closer, and cuts the space around bodies. The film stock and heavy use of day-for-night create an unreal, milky night where one is never fully in daylight nor in complete darkness.

Sound becomes a weapon: blasting music, saturated noises, a dog barking endlessly, the house creaking. The goal is not to accompany the viewer but to overwhelm them, just as disoriented as the couple at the film’s center. Minimal objects—a sink full of dishes, an ironing board, an open fridge—become narrative nodes: Ramsay works through ellipses, details, and silences rather than verbal explanations.

Jennifer Lawrence builds a performance made of feral instincts and primal mimicry with the surrounding nature: she crawls on all fours, licks dirty glass, strips during a birthday party, masturbates in the garden, abandons herself to postures more animal than human. English-language critics and festivals have openly evoked the idea of “feral women,” placing her work in continuity with figures like Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion or Lawrence herself in Aronofsky’s Mother!.

Combining the “body horror” and postpartum readings, the more clinical one centered on bipolar disorder, and the auteurist one that embraces an undiagnosed anarchy, the film polarizes: enthusiasm for its sensory power on one side, outright rejection from part of the audience on the other. Die My Love thus appears for what it is: a film built on friction, not consensus.

Ramsay pushes her aesthetics to the limit: plot and psychological development take a back seat to a subjective, physical, often repetitive immersion. The lack of a clear narrative compass is, for some, the political core of the work; for others, the measure of its emptiness.

The result is an object that refuses to be tamed: a portrait of motherhood and mental illness that offers no consolation, asks for no forgiveness, and provides no interpretive guide. For some viewers, it is a necessary fever, giving shape to what cannot be said in “acceptable” narratives of parenthood. For others, it is a repellent device that mistakes noise for depth, leaving behind more irritation than understanding.

The split is not a byproduct—it is the film’s very condition of existence.

I haven’t seen it yet, but if this is what’s being said about it, the theaters will surely need to be filled.

Copyright © 2025 - Mondo Internazionale APS - Tutti i diritti riservati

Image source:

https://www.festival-cannes.com/en/f/die-my-love/

Die My Love, directed by Lynne Ramsay – © Festival de Cannes