Die My Love Review (2025 BFI London Film Festival)
Sometimes there are changes in our lives that we can verbalise, or maybe we can, but it’s not enough, it’s a pulse running through our bodies reaching out to be connected to something, someone, lashing out at an enemy we can’t see, loving a lover who’s not there. We try and perform stability for those we love so they know we’re ok and not hurting, but how long can that really go on?
Die My Love follows Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson), a coupled-up writer and musician from New York who move to Jackson’s uncle’s old country house out in Montana. After a whirlwind of intense carnality and love that comes from being alone together, the couple now have a child and Grace still feels that intensity but towards herself, her body and her mentality seems to claw against the walls of “mother and wife” closing in her, drawing away from writing and more than often found in the house alone while Jackson is at work.
Lynne Ramsey is a director who’s always been about the sensory, from her Scottish debut Ratcatcher to her recent Hollywood work, like the Joaquin Phoenix-starring You Were Never Really Here. Through these films, even the more explicitly plotted ones, there’s a marriage of sound design, free-flowing visuals and onscreen performance that create real texture to the external world and the internal world of her characters. This leaves a perfect amount of space for Lynne to create Die My Love, a film that may not feel logically in tune but remains brazen in its emotions, physicality and texture from beginning to end.
None of this works without an utterly committed performance from Jennifer Lawrence, not only in the large outbursts of rage and animalistic physicality she inhabits, but also in the smaller moments where suburban malaise and the ideas placed on her as a mother seem to be getting under her skin. Grace tries to keep all of this together as she goes to middle-class parties where wives with their pearly white teeth laugh and smile about possibly going through postpartum depression, understanding Grace but not seeing her and treating her like an equal regardless of whether she looks stressed and dishevelled on the surface.
Cynically, one could see this performance as another actress’s take on Gena Rowlands’ legendary performance in A Woman Under The Influence, but Ramsey frames her lead actress differently than Cassavetes, allowing Jennifer’s performance to be the fuel to a film that is aesthetically closer to a PJ Harvey album than high-tiered dramatics.
A majority of the film focuses on Grace and her internal journey, something that we feel viscerally in our bodies as cinematography and sound excellently communicate without being logical or giving a reason why this is happening. This leaves Robert Pattinson’s Jackson as a great opposite to play off Grace, as someone who doesn’t understand what’s going on, wants to help, but also is slowly moving away from Grace as his responsibilities pile up and feels fearful about what she is becoming. We have reason to suspect Jackson, as Grace constantly finds new condom boxes in his glove compartment box but he’s never portrayed as completely uncaring or a terrible person, even if the movie is relayed from Grace’s view. He’s just as knotty and complex as she, even if he’s committed to normalcy and domesticity that never seems to sink into Grace.
Everyone will come out of Die My Love with different conclusions, as nothing is played to the surface only to the cerebral and the senses, making Lynne Ramsey’s depiction of motherhood ring in my body like sitting next to a school bell bolted on a wall. I think I can safely say I will never experience the events of this (I am a man and I do not like the woods), but the film brought me as close as I ever will be in its tone and also use of cinematic language to engage the grey areas of life.
We all have moments where we don’t understand who or what we are as we transitions from one point to the next, painfully shedding the old self into the new until we are reborn, Lynne Ramsey understands that’s something we’ve all felt that sensation in love and also heartbreak but rather than trying to explain it, none of us can explain it in the moment, she lets us experience it again and see ourselves reflected the textures and linings found in Die My Love.
★★★★ 1/2
Screening as part of the 2025 BFI London Film Festival on October 17th, 18th and 19th / In UK cinemas November 7th / Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Pattinson, Sissy Spacek, Nick Nolte / Dir: Lynne Ramsay / MUBI / 15
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