Lynne Ramsay (2025)
October 2017. Last day of the London Film Festival. Sally and I see Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here, starring Joaquin Phoenix, except that Sally walks out before the end. When I get home, she says, ‘Remind me never to go to a film again just because I like the main actor’.
October 2025. Penultimate day of the LFF. I go (on my own) to Ramsay’s Die My Love, starring Jennifer Lawrence, an actor I particularly like. I see the film through, with Sally’s words ringing in my ears. Note to self: whatever the subject, whoever the cast, in future leave Lynne Ramsay films well alone.
This shouldn’t be a hard task unless Ramsay changes the habits of a film-making lifetime. Not only is Die My Love her first feature in eight years but only her fifth overall, in more than a quarter-century. The first, Ratcatcher (1999), is the only one of the five I’ll be missing out on. The intervening three I saw somewhat out of sequence, We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) and You Were Never Really Here before Morvern Callar (2002). Along with Die My Love, they reflect a standard pattern: a fine actor in the lead role (Samantha Morton in Morvern Callar, Tilda Swinton in Kevin) struggles to rise above the director’s mania for attention-compelling images and sonic bravura. Die My Love – adapted by Ramsay, Enda Walsh and Alice Birch from Argentine writer Ariana Harwicz’s 2012 novel of the same name (but with a comma after the verbal imperative) – is the story of a young mother’s post-partum depression that becomes psychosis. Ramsay is impatient to get on with this gruelling ordeal. With next to no indication of her pre-partum mental health, protagonist Grace’s descent into psychological hell is a short journey that turns out a long stay.
Somewhere in rural Montana, Grace (Lawrence) and her boyfriend Jackson (Robert Pattinson) move into a house that Jackson has inherited from his recently deceased uncle. As soon as they arrive there, the couple have spectacularly vigorous sex; within a few screen minutes, Grace has given birth to a baby boy. Jackson’s work takes him away from home much of the time and, it’s implied, into the beds of other women. Grace starts to fall apart; masturbating, whether indoors or in the woods around the house, doesn’t help. Lynne Ramsay wants the audience to get at least a superficial idea of what Grace is going through: the combination of Seamus McGarvey’s penumbral lighting, the volume of music on a car radio and Jackson’s reliably irritating behaviour is enough to drive anyone crazy. Jackson surpasses himself by bringing home a dog for Grace to look after, along with the baby. The animal first barks incessantly, then whimpers incessantly, perhaps in pain; Grace urges Jackson to shoot it – ‘Something you love is suffering, put it out of its misery’. When Jackson hesitates, she does the job, with a rifle.
After that, Grace either has or imagines an affair with a passing motorcyclist (LaKeith Stanfield), throws herself through a glass door and, whenever he’s around, fights with Jackson, who astonishingly decides it’ll help if they get married. You’re sure Grace is out of her mind when she accepts the proposal. The newlyweds fall out again at their wedding reception and Grace heads alone to the bridal suite, where she headbutts a mirror, drawing blood. She then starts to walk home, with the baby in his pushchair. Jackson intercepts her and commits his wife, still in her wedding dress, to a mental hospital. After one session there with a therapist (Tom Carey), Grace returns for a big welcome-home party. When guests tell her how well she looks, she swiftly exits; Jackson follows and takes her for a drive. They stop at the edge of a forest. Grace says, ‘Enough’, walks into the forest, and sets herself on fire.
Most things in Die My Love are as grim as can be, regardless of their importance to the main story. For example, the uncle who bequeathed the house to Jackson is revealed to have committed suicide there – what a brilliant foreshadowing of things going wrong for the place’s new occupants! There are a few small mercies to be had, for which you’re grateful enough not to worry even when they seem questionable within the film’s overall scheme. Chief among these is that, however far Grace spins out of control, her infant son comes to no harm; indeed, she always seems a more responsible parent than silly Jackson. The only convincing suggestion of a normal world from which Grace is separated comes from Sissy Spacek in the small role of Jackson’s widowed mother, Pam – despite the build-up she’s given in the narrative: Jackson says his mother can’t accept the loss of her deceased husband, that Pam sleepwalks carrying a loaded gun, and so on. (Jackson’s late father, Harry (Nick Nolte), appears briefly in flashback to confirm that he was suffering from dementia.) Most of the small roles are cartoonish, though Saylor McPherson comes through as a chatty girl at a shop checkout, who gets a verbal lashing from Grace.
Thanks to her terrific wit, Jennifer Lawrence delivers plenty of her lines with impact and aplomb, but you’re always aware of what a waste of her talents the film is. (LaKeith Stanfield is completely wasted in his small role.) In brief interludes when Ramsay isn’t using the soundtrack assaultively, her eclectic song selection is quite amusing: Pinky and Perky’s version of ‘Let’s Twist Again’, ‘Little April Shower’ from Bambi (though this is included for obvious ironic effect), ‘The Clapping Song’; the film’s theme music, to the extent that it’s heard more than once, is ‘In Spite of Ourselves’, by John Prine and Iris Dement. In a nearly unique moment of harmony between them in the car, Grace and Jackson sing along to David Bowie’s ‘Kooks’, which makes for a doubly refreshing bit of relief. As human drama, Die My Love is almost wholly unaffecting, though. Hellbent on imposing her own, technique-driven signature, Lynne Ramsay leaves no room in her films for anything or anyone else.
18 October 2025
