Jennifer Lawrence Delivers Her Most Uncompromising Performance Yet in a Ferocious Vision of Motherhood
Released on May 17, 2025, following its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, Die My Love is a visceral, uncompromising psychological drama directed by Lynne Ramsay (We Need to Talk About Kevin, You Were Never Really Here) and adapted from Ariana Harwicz’s novel of the same name. The screenplay is co-written by Ramsay, Enda Walsh, and Alice Birch. Starring Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Pattinson, Sissy Spacek, Nick Nolte, and LaKeith Stanfield, this 2025 film is distributed by MUBI and runs a tight, intense 110 minutes.
This film review explores Ramsay’s chilling, fragmented portrait of Grace, a woman unraveling after childbirth in rural Montana. Equal parts postnatal horror, fractured love story, and existential scream, Die My Love is not just one of the boldest movies of 2025, but also one of the most emotionally raw and cinematically daring.
Genre:Comedy, Thriller
Jennifer Lawrence Unleashed: Grace in Chaos
From the first frame, it's clear that Die My Love is centered around a woman on the brink, and Jennifer Lawrence devours the role of Grace with animalistic precision. Crawling through fields, muttering absurdities, lashing out at her husband and her surroundings, Grace is a woman whose world has shifted irreparably, and she can’t find her footing.
Lawrence channels something primal, moving seamlessly from moments of sensual abandon to chilling disassociation. She laughs, she growls, she dances like she’s exorcising demons, and in her stillest moments, she breaks your heart. This is not a portrait of polite sadness, it’s feral, messy, and painfully real.
Her performance is fearless, the kind that burns itself into your memory. She embodies the extremes of desire, frustration, and isolation that define her character's postpartum descent without turning her into a cliché or caricature.
A Love Story Turned Inside Out
At its core, Die My Love is about a relationship cracking under the strain of unmet needs. Grace and Jackson (a quietly devastating Robert Pattinson) were once passionate lovers. Now, they’re trapped in a dilapidated house in the Montana wilderness with a newborn, clinging to old affections that have turned brittle.
Jackson isn’t a villain, but he’s useless in the way some men are, absent even when present, offering love without understanding. Pattinson plays him with restraint, never tipping into melodrama, which makes his scenes with Lawrence feel all the more lived-in and painful.
Their dynamic is complicated and uncomfortable. They fight with fury, and then share tender, broken moments. Ramsay captures how love can curdle into resentment, and still remain love.
Ramsay’s Wild, Unflinching Vision
Director Lynne Ramsay returns with a vengeance after a seven-year absence, and Die My Love might be her most visually aggressive film yet. Working with longtime cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, Ramsay crafts an atmosphere that pulses with unease. The 4:3 aspect ratio closes in on Grace like a trap, while the grainy textures and saturated colors evoke both fever dreams and decaying Americana.
Montana is rendered as a surreal no-man’s-land, wildflowers blooming beside rot, buzzing flies accompanying lullabies. The production design by Tim Grimes and costuming by Catherine George cleverly strip away any specific time period, giving the film a timeless, mythic quality.
The soundtrack is equally unpredictable, mixing kitschy pop like Toni Basil’s “Mickey” with Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” and ending on a duet of John Prine’s “In Spite of Ourselves.” Ramsay weaponizes music, using it to underline Grace’s volatility and moments of surreal beauty.
Motherhood, Madness, and the Myth of Control
Ramsay doesn’t offer a diagnosis or a lesson. Instead, she plunges us directly into Grace’s crumbling mental state, offering no clean boundaries between reality and hallucination. One minute, Grace is lovingly nursing her child; the next, she’s smashing walls or chasing a phantom biker (LaKeith Stanfield) through the woods.
This is not just a story about postpartum depression, it’s about a woman who’s been hollowed out by unmet needs, social pressure, and a partner who no longer sees her. Her madness is both reaction and rebellion. Ramsay refuses to sanitize it.
Sissy Spacek adds quiet gravitas as Jackson’s mother, Pam. Her scenes with Grace offer moments of awkward compassion, suggesting an older woman who understands pain but doesn’t know how to help. Nick Nolte, as Jackson’s increasingly forgetful father, provides fleeting moments of warmth and mortality.
A Psychosexual Western of the Soul
Die My Love functions almost like a Western in disguise. Grace becomes a frontierswoman of her own psyche, armed, half-naked, wandering through fields with her child strapped to her chest. There are rifles, horses, and a sense of lawlessness, but the battles here are emotional and interior.
The landscape becomes an extension of Grace’s inner world: expansive, beautiful, and unknowable. Scenes of her dancing in the kitchen, masturbating on the floor, or stripping at a party feel like acts of resistance. Ramsay captures them not for shock value, but to evoke the desperation behind them.
When the film leans into surrealism, Grace cooling herself in a refrigerator, hallucinating strangers, or tearing wallpaper with bloodied fingers, it does so with cinematic purpose. Ramsay’s touch is bold, but always precise.
Grace Isn’t “Crazy”, She’s Unheard
One of the most powerful aspects of Die My Love is its critique of how society treats women on the edge. Grace’s breakdown is met with platitudes: “Try yoga,” “Talk to someone,” “You just need rest.” Ramsay frames these moments with biting irony, showing how systems fail even when they appear supportive.
Grace doesn’t want to be fixed. She wants to be seen, touched, loved, not as a mother, or a partner, but as herself. The film makes the audience feel her alienation until it becomes almost unbearable.
In lesser hands, this could feel like a wallow in misery. But Ramsay, Lawrence, and the ensemble make Die My Love emotionally devastating because they anchor it in humanity. Grace isn’t a monster. She’s a mirror.
Final Verdict – A Cinematic Breakdown Worth Experiencing
Die My Love is not an easy watch, but it’s a necessary one. Brutal, poetic, and darkly funny, it pulls us into the vortex of a woman’s unraveling with such intimacy and intensity that it leaves you breathless. Jennifer Lawrence gives the performance of her career, untamed, hypnotic, and fully alive.
Lynne Ramsay once again proves herself one of the most daring filmmakers of her generation. With Die My Love, she’s crafted a 2025 movie that confronts the messy, terrifying truths of motherhood, mental illness, and identity with brutal beauty and black humor.
For audiences willing to sit in the discomfort, this is a film that lingers - like a scar, like a dream, like love itself.
Rating: ★★★★★ (5/5)