‘Die, My Love’ Review: Jennifer Lawrence Howls Through Lynne Ramsay’s Country-Goth Meltdown

The experts will have a field day with me. I come from a normal family. Too normal,” writes Ariana Harwicz in Matate, amor, the novel that inspired the film of the same name — loosely translated as Die, My Love — directed by Lynne Ramsay and starring Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson. In the book, the unnamed protagonist — a foreigner living in rural France, isolated and adrift — suffers through motherhood with violent intensity. What begins as something resembling postpartum depression soon mutates into something stranger, darker. Ramsay’s adaptation turns the couple into figures straight out of one of those bleak, blood-soaked country ballads Nick Cave might sing. There’s still a baby, yes, but in this film — all surface and fever — the real problem lies elsewhere. Something uncontainable, maybe even unspeakable.

Ramsay, once the queen of quiet devastation (Ratcatcher, Morvern Callar), has long abandoned subtlety for raw combustion. Harwicz’s novel becomes her pretext to unleash another monster. Gone is the psychological density of the book’s narrator; in its place, Grace (irony alert, episode one) is a creature shaped by Ramsay’s hand and embodied by Lawrence as a feral woman who wants only three things: sex, sleep for her baby, and silence from the damn dog. She dreams of order — of something, anything, aligning for once — but this countryside Eden quickly reveals itself as a domestic hell. From the start, Ramsay makes it clear: there are rats in the basement, both literal and metaphorical, and nothing in this house will stay intact for long.

On screen, Die, My Love becomes the chronicle of a slow psychological collapse — a woman losing her grip, lashing out at her husband, herself, the dog, the world. Jackson (Pattinson, as blandly functional as the husband in Harwicz’s book) is a mama’s boy whose life runs on a five-item menu: beer, truck, burger, job, home. That’s it. Grace, trapped in a near-constant state of lust (it is Pattinson, after all), finds his apathy unbearable. Desire turns to suspicion, suspicion to fury.

The film keeps raising the emotional temperature but dulls the meaning behind it. Eventually it becomes circular, predictable: each breakdown worse than the last, each outburst a louder echo. No therapist, friend, or miracle could save her. Jackson, ever inept, makes things worse — like bringing home the most annoying dog alive, when what she wanted was a cat. The only person with a shred of empathy is his mother, played by the great Sissy Spacek, who quietly hands the torch — and the fire — to a new generation. Nick Nolte wanders in briefly, but his cameo is so slight it borders on humiliation.

Oppressive from the first frame — the couple’s only peaceful moments are over by minute five — Die, My Love has nowhere to go but through the wall. Lawrence throws herself into Grace’s manic intensity, and the performance, all nerves and hunger, keeps the film from collapsing completely. The soundtrack, a sharp mix of country and punk rock, finds a surprising bridge between genres — both born of rage and restlessness. And there’s something refreshing about the refusal to offer neat psychological answers. “My grandfather didn’t rape me, nor my uncle. I had a childhood, but I forgot it,” writes Harwicz, detonating the trauma cliché in one line. Not every wound comes with a backstory. Sometimes, as another poet of despair put it, “the world made me this way / I can’t change.”

It’s a pity Ramsay has little to offer beyond her signature audiovisual shock treatment — all flickering rage and sensory assault — because buried somewhere inside this chaos is a dangerous idea: that Grace’s violence, her rage, her despair, might be politically incorrect in the best sense — too raw, too indecent for our current narrative comfort zones. Harwicz’s novel bites into that discomfort; Ramsay turns it into an aesthetic pose, the cinematic equivalent of an ALL CAPS social-media rant, preferably featuring J.Law naked — the kind of “bold” provocation that looks great in a trailer but leaves little to chew on. The result is a contradictory, self-cancelling film that trivializes what it set out to confront: a howl of madness turned into marketable noise.