In one of the terrifyingly labored and overwrought scenes that make up Lynne Ramsay’s “Die My Love,” Grace (Jennifer Lawrence), who’s suffering from an acute case of mental trauma — the film would have you believe it’s postpartum depression, though you could make a good case that it’s not — has had enough of the noisy dog that her partner, Jackson (Robert Pattinson), brought home for no good reason. The two are living in the country, in a home that Jackson inherited from his uncle, a house that definitely qualifies as a fixer-upper. These two just haven’t bothered to fix it up.
They have a baby, you see, a sweet little boy, and ever since he came into their lives everything has been falling apart. The dog literally never stops yapping (it’s the most annoying dog in history), so Grace, who has brought over a shotgun, asks Jackson to shoot it. He says: Are you kidding that’s crazy! So Grace picks up the shotgun and does the deed herself.
It’s clear that she’s got a problem. Yet I couldn’t help but wonder why Jackson, with a new baby to deal with, brought home that dog in the first place — or, more to the point, why he seemed so flagrantly insensitive to the fact that Grace didn’t want a dog. This situation typifies the dynamic of “Die My Love,” which is as follows: Grace acts out in delirious, raging, violent, inexplicable ways — and Jackson, while understandably dismayed at her behavior, reacts to it by rarely lifting a finger to do anything that would help her. Is he insensitive or just dumb? Pattinson, in a rare bad performance, just plays him as an unpleasant clueless bro. “Die My Love” presents us with a case of the blind leading the damned.
Postpartum depression is a syndrome that was once in the shadows, and there are ways it remains so. It’s still misunderstood and under-treated and not empathized with enough. Yet “Die My Love” serves up a showy yet strange, in many ways baffling hyperbolic projection of what can take place in the hearts and minds of women during the first months (or even years) of motherhood.
This is the first film directed by Lynne Ramsay in seven years, since the startling Joaquin Phoenix depravity-and-revenge drama “You Were Never Really Here” (2017), and what she establishes in the film’s early scenes, which feature a lot of in-your-face drinking and fucking, is that Grace and Jackson are a kind of dissolute punk-rock couple, the sort of nihilist parents who aren’t going to let having a baby get in the way of their Budweiser regimen. That’s okay; they have a right to keep drinking and raise a kid at the same time. But there’s very little sense that either of them has decided to become a responsible adult.
She’s an aspiring writer who says, as soon as the baby is born, that she’s done with writing. He’s got…some kind of job, that he seems to do occasionally, on the road (we have no idea what it is), but mostly the two are just hanging out in that house. There’s very little structure to their lives, or to the movie, beyond Ramsay’s art-house showbiz instinct to keep cranking up the shock level of Grace’s behavior. It’s not really a dialogue-driven movie. Grace and Jackson never have a simple conversation about future plans, or health insurance, or buying groceries, or about how they intend to parent. They just seem like morose post-collegiate slackers who had a baby because they like to fuck a lot and, you know, shit happens.
So when Grace starts to act out in a way that makes it seems like she’s totally not with the mommy program, the context the movie has created for that is: These two already seem like they’re not really with the mommy-and-daddy program. There’s never a moment, for instance, when we see them beholding their son with joy; he’s more like an accessory they have to take care of. And while there’s no simple template for how postpartum depression expresses itself, it can often be incredibly inward.
Grace’s total alienation from motherhood, on the other hand, is flamboyantly outward. As a filmmaker, Ramsay is a mood poet who favors violence and needle drops (there’s a lot of Scorsese in her blood), in this case literal ones, since our two hipster parents have a turntable. Grace first starts to transition into derangement when Toni Basil’s “Mickey” is playing, and the song starts to skip and repeat, and Grace keeps saying “All right! All right!” and then licks the window pane. Ramsay has a lavish gift for staging that sort of baroque rock ‘n’ roll breakdown. (A little later, Grace will crash through that same window.) From the start, though, the film almost seems to be getting high on the dysfunctional flamboyance of the behavior it’s showing you. “Die My Love” keeps saying: This may be mental illness…but wow, is it ever cinema! On some level we’re watching Grace crack up because wallowing in this much trauma is fixating.
In pre-feminist times (say, the 1950s), it was the definition of unenlightened patriarchal myopia to view a woman as “irrational” or “overemotional” or — Freud’s word — “hysterical.” But just as many aspects of the past, including those that once seemed retrograde, can be reclaimed with a new consciousness, the notion that a new mother has every right to be irrational in her despair — something that just about everyone in the movie, notably Jackson’s mother, Pam (Sissy Spacek), tells Grace — is very much at the center of where we are now. That, in its way, is progress. Because it’s reality. The burdens of motherhood can be every bit as staggering as the joys.
But “Die My Love,” for all of Ramsay’s talent, isn’t designed to explore that experience. It’s designed, rather, as a kind of thesis movie: reckless on the surface but overdetermined. And I think that’s why Jennifer Lawrence’s performance feels so explosive but, at the same time, so emotionally reined in. In “Die My Love,” you feel the power of her presence, the hellbent quality of her rage. When it comes to chewing out a blabby cashier, crawling around like an animal, trashing the bathroom and pouring soap products all over the floor, or bashing her head on a mirror, she’s an ace wastrel. But the very force of her destruction makes us want to go: What is happening?
We want the film to offer some kind of answer. Jackson checks Grace into a mental hospital, and she gets “better,” to the extent that that means she emerges eager to bake cakes and hide her darkness behind a sunny agreeability that looks like a parody of happy-homemaker domesticity. But by now we’re onto the film; we’re just waiting for that façade to crack. Frankly, it looked to me like Grace, whether or not she’s suffering from postpartum depression, has borderline personality disorder. But that would be a different movie. By the time “Die My Love” reaches its voluptuously incendiary yet somehow rather rote ending, you may wish you were watching a different movie.