There’s no slow build in British filmmaker Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love, an artistically exciting and deeply uncomfortable portrait of a marriage and mind in free fall.
The film is an adaptation of a France-set, Spanish-language novel by Ariana Harwicz, and Ramsay (We Need to Talk about Kevin) moves its story to rural Montana, where young married couple, Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson), have moved from New York City to take over his dead uncle’s spacious but decrepit house and be nearer his parents, Pam (Sissy Spacek) and Harry (Nick Nolte). Loud and frenetic, it crunches up and down through various gears, all of them intense and rattling and never abandoning a punkish sense of anarchy and abandon while keeping a compassionate eye firmly on the woman at its core.
The film’s still, long opening shot of the couple exploring their beaten-up new home is immediately unsettling: there’s the sound of rats scratching around upstairs and Seamus McGarvey’s camera – the photography throughout is stunning – feels like the ghost in the room. Straightaway there’s a raw passion and energy to Grace and Jackson’s relationship, a sense of danger, but that turns darker when a baby comes along.
The black-comic, big-hearted spirit pulls you through the despair
Much of the film serves as a jumpy, fiery, fragmented impression of Grace’s mental and physical breakdown after giving birth to their son. Grace crawls through the grass with a knife; sex becomes a weapon; a motorbike tears menacingly through the night outside. Less specifically, it also reads as an exaggerated, confrontational, raw sketch of the universal madness of two humans not just trying to make it through life together, but even just through the next day, hour, minute, second. Grace is totally lost, and Jackson is maddeningly ineffective and helpless, but it’s also a deeply romantic story in its own weird way. Here are two people just trying.
The more tamed aspects of human nature turn wild in Ramsay’s hands. What’s real and what’s not; what’s past and what’s present – both are fluid here. It might sound heavy, but there’s wicked humour too, especially when Grace interacts with her husband’s family or with well-meaning friends and neighbours.
All the cast feel totally ingrained in Ramsay’s storytelling, but it’s Lawrence who’s wildly impressive. Ramsay excels in getting inside the heads of forceful, damaged, strange characters, and it’s Grace’s world she has built here. It’s a world of terror, passion, destruction and constant hope that things can be better again. It’s a deeply raw and honest film. It’s bleak, but it also has a musical, black-comic, big-hearted spirit that pulls you through the despair.
Die My Love premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.