DIE MY LOVE
Directed by: Lynne Ramsay
Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Pattinson, LaKeith Stanfield
Certificate: 15
Rating: 8/10
Over the past quarter-century Lynne Ramsay has adapted novels about Ibizan ravers (Morvern Callar), teenage murderers (We Need to Talk About Kevin) and child traffickers (You Were Never Really Here), while remaining the most idiosyncratic, vividly personal British director working today. But she has never made a film quite so intensely Ramsay-ish as Die My Love. Nominally adapted from a novel by Ariana Harwicz, it feels as if it has been torn straight from her dreams. In a film stuffed with pointed needle-drops – from John Prine to David Bowie, Cocteau Twins to Billie Holiday – it feels only right that Ramsay herself sings over the end credits, a mordant cover of “Love Will Tear Us Apart”.
The phrase “hot mess” hardly covers it. Die My Love is a raging, delirious inferno. Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson are Grace and Jackson, a young couple with a new baby who have inherited an isolated house on the Montana prairie. It’s a fixer-upper with a morbid history, but they are carried away by cottagecore fantasies of a future in which Grace might finish her novel while raising their child.
The fairytale swiftly becomes a nightmare. Jackson travels for work and, when he returns, seems more concerned with his new dog. Left alone with the baby in a lonely house buzzing with frustration, Grace spirals into lurid, gothic fantasies full of wild horses, motorbikes and forest fires. Is this a simmering portrait of post-partum psychosis? A bipolar fable of feminist fantasy? Ramsay herself has described it as a searing screwball comedy of lust and infatuation, though you may struggle to find the laughs.
What is clear is that Jennifer Lawrence is having the time of her life, crashing through plate-glass windows, diving into swimming pools, throwing herself from moving vehicles and generally tearing up the screen like a tornado through a cornfield. It’s her gusto and wholehearted commitment to Ramsay’s very personal vision that make Die My Love a defiantly strange modern classic.
