Die My Love: Jennifer Lawrence delivers a stunning performance

Only Lynne Ramsay could inject so much angst, fury and passion into the untranslatable pain of not being seen. Her cinema is so alive and so sensory, from Ratcatcher to You Were Never Really Here, and in her latest offering, she adapts Ariana Harwicz’s novel to blistering effect. It is irksome that the film has been pocketed as a study of postpartum depression, when it is about so much more. Co-written with Enda Walsh and Alice Birch, it is often a discomfiting watch, but Ramsay wants you to stay till the very end. She wants you to extend your empathy with a woman who won’t listen, agree or look you in the eye. It exists from her point of view.
It starts with a long shot of Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson) inspecting a property far off the town, which will soon become their home. The cinematography by Seamus McGarvey, exquisite throughout, establishes this scene from a distance. It is as if there is a ghost somewhere, lurking behind the room. Grace and Jackson arrive, and in the blink of an eye, there’s a baby too. It is a family of three now, and the baby cries, babbles and coos like most babies do. Jackson goes off to work, and Grace is left alone with the baby.
An aspiring author, her days are spent in hallucinatory woes as she slowly loses her mind. She cannot contain anything anymore; there is no signal or directness in the way the days turn into night. It is a frenzy of unbridled emotions, which Ramsay explores with tight control. She is not looking for a reason here. The film operates on an operatic level of momentum, where we are passive witnesses to Grace’s growing sense of despair and anxiety. We cannot save her from herself, and we are not given any answers. Jackson’s mother is the first one to see her truly, even as she sleepwalks at night with a loaded gun.