After nearly ten years since her last feature film , director Lynne Ramsey returns to theaters. Die My Love follows Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson), a young couple who move from New York City to Jackson’s rural childhood home in Montana. The two soon become parents, but Grace has a hard time adjusting to the new environment and her postpartum status, struggling with feelings of isolation and psychological distress. As her mental health condition gradually deteriorates, her their marriage into unsettling and unpredictable territory.
Leading up to its release, tidbits on what Die My Love would be about focused on the film being a sort of seven-year itch, tale of a disillusioned wife. In reality, what this story covers is the complicated psychology reality of what many women experience postpartum with the strain this causes for their husbands, and ultimately their marriages. Grace is left to deal with a substantial amount of change during a period of time in her life that is both short and volatile. She has just had her first child while also moving to a new, unfamiliar place that is also extremely isolated. As a result, the new mother feels if she’s losing herself within her new identity; both professionally as a writer and as a woman and a wife due to her and Jackson’s waining physical intimacy. The combination of boredom, loneliness, and changing identity with the chemical imbalance of having just given birth cause her to slowly descend into madness with her young husband unable to help due to his work schedule and slowness in recognizing the issue.
Ramsey presents Grace’s psychosis in a surrealist way throughout the film, interspersing fantasy enough that the audience will question whether many of the scenes are actually occurring or whether they’re just in her head, most notably a recurring fantasy she has of engaging in an affair with her neighbor Karl (Lakeith Stanfield). It’s an effective way to present an unstable mind onscreen and the protagonist such that their condition becomes more understood, if not more empathetic. Ramsey also utilizes flashbacks to flesh out Grace as a character more and establish the basis for why she was perhaps more susceptible to a mental break under her circumstances than a typical person would be, thus providing more color and exploration of the issue of mental health as a whole. It is often the sum of a person’s experiences that contribute to a mental health crisis or issues rather than one major event and Die My Love makes this point in addition to its base theme of postpartum depression.
Lawrence’s performance compliments the writing and direction of Grace’s descent into madness perfectly with the actress capturing the character’s instability and unpredictability. Viewers never really know what she’s going to do or how she will react, keeping them on edge whenever she appears which mirrors the real effect that Grace or a person having a mental health crisis would have on those around her and closest to her. Lawrence can be empathetic at times while in other moments frustrating, again capturing the essence of what it would be like to deal with her character in reality. Her depiction of Grace is highly effective in its realism and pulling emotion from the audience as they watch both her and her family struggle with her health. Sissy Spacek offers a sympathetic portrayal of Jackson’s mother Pam, the first person to notice Grace’s burgeoning mental health issues. Pam is obviously representative of the empathetic female perspective, a mother herself who dealt with the mental strain of postpartum mental issues and not feeling like yourself, which she shares with Grace numerous times in an effort to help her through her issues. Spacek is tender and caring as an elderly woman who sees her young daughter-in-law at a pivotal moment in her life where she feels unseen, portraying someone who many women that have been in Grace’s position wishes they’d had when they needed her.
Pattinson’s role as the increasingly exasperated and unsure husband provides a realistic glimpse at what it is like for the family of women suffering from postpartum; at first clueless to a neglectful degree, unable to see that his young wife needed him, but then lost and confused once he sees her spiraling and not knowing how best to save his young family. Pattinson is able to effectively toe the line in the emotion required from both stages of Jackson’s journey, frustrating at the beginning and sympathetic once he turns it around and wants to help but can’t figure out why. It is important to the story that he hit both stations for the audience and Pattinson ‘s lauded talent allows him to serve both purposes in an effective way that lands where the chador is supposed to in the way required. He’s the stand-in for those that have loved someone in Grace’s shoes or the depiction for those who must be shown what it’s like to love someone suffering from this disease and his performance makes the point well. Die My Love utilizes surrealist filmmaking and quality acting to paint an all-encompassing and sympathetic portrait of mental illness and specifically what women deal with in the aftermath of pregnancy. It’s a well-made film that is sure to spark some thought and make many women feel seen.
Image: MUBI
