Die My Love Review

Decorated arthouse director Lynne Ramsay returns in typically sharp yet sensuous fashion with her new film Die My Love, following young couple Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson) as they move into an isolated inherited house and Grace's deepest emotional and mental turmoil explodes into maddening conflict between the pair.

After an eight year gap between her last two films, Ramsay demonstrates all her strongest skills for using textural impressionism to complicate what could be taken as a straightforward domestic drama. The mix of quickly moving claustrophobic handheld shots alongside slowly panning wide angle images of interiors and exterior "vistas" are all boxed in a 4:3 aspect ratio, giving a visceral sense of the protagonist's acute sensitivity to the restrictions of her situation and her will to thrash out of the textual and literal box she's been placed in; this sense of rebellion at all costs expands beyond simply what is seen and begins rearranging when it is seen as well, obfuscating the timeline of events and what can even be believed to be true or a strongly held belief to a maddening degree. It's no surprise that Ramsay has located another story suitable for her methods of immersing a viewer into the experiential headspace of a character on the brink of mental catastrophe or epiphany, but it is a pleasure to see her do so once again with no confidence lost after a long break.

Lynne Ramsay's chops for visual design and structural gamesmanship remain intact, but perhaps her most notable work on this project is her direction of actors/actresses. The fractious extremes of the central relationship might seem unspecific from a writing angle if it weren't for both leads full-body committing to shading in the details of both roles, but especially if Jennifer Lawrence wasn't firing on more cylinders than are normally registered. Her depiction of emotional turmoil that leads to caustic outbursts and depressive despair is deeply affecting, and eventually overwhelms both Robert Pattinson's desperately naive Jackson and his performance in general.  

There's no lack of scenes of transgressive domestic conflict captured in Die My Love’s perfectly disorienting frames and elliptical editing, ranging from furious barking matches with unruly pets to emptying entire bathrooms' worth of shampoo on the floor to even an impulsive suicide attempt via surprise exiting a moving car, but the heart of the film lies in how Ramsay's able to locate deep reserves of empathy for all characters involved by playing with the audience's perspective on which character is sympathetic at a given moment. Eventually all character flaws are laid bare, and the characters and viewers are forced to make decisions on what their own personal limits of empathy and support are in regards to such thorny, irreconcilable situations, and what true motives of possession and ownership might be hiding beneath those limits. Wisely, the film refuses to provide answers, which reveals a commitment to emotional and social realism that's just underneath the amped up depictions of misunderstood misbehavior providing the driving action of the story.

Die My Love works best when considered as a gender-flipped depiction of unsupported mental illness in society in conversation with Ramsay's last feature, You Were Never Really Here. With that film, Ramsay worked with Joaquin Phoenix to examine how men, in the face of trauma and attendant mental turmoil, tend to retreat within themselves and create internal fantasies of redemptive violence and self-destruction to reassert their sense of self in the face of a harsh world. Conversely, Die My Love examines via Lawrence's Grace how women through a series of coincidences and misjudged choices can be saddled with strictly defined roles in society that provide fulfillment to some and exclusion to others, leaving little room for those who don't conform. In forcing those women into the constraints of said positions, they and their loved ones get trapped into cycles of attempting to communicate discontent and repeatedly being misunderstood and neglected to the point of exacerbating any existing mental or emotional troubles they may have in their lives to tragic proportions.

Stifling routine and restrictive surroundings create a perfect pressure cooker for Grace's worst flaws to boil over, but the film maintains a sober view of how lack of meaningful support mixed with no accountability from her main supporter Jackson makes it entirely reductive to put the blame on her shoulders for her acting out. Gone are the days of media like The Sopranos making absurd assertions that people with borderline personality disorder are "incapable of love or joy;" this is likely the most empathetic depiction of an individual (a woman, no less!) with BPD and the struggles they have to deal with on top of being frequently ostracized for surface-level erratic behavior.

Die My Love covers a lot of tangled, thorny ground, but it always does justice to the disparate subjects of interest it brings up and continues to deliver on the promise of a Lynne Ramsay film as more of an experience than something to be described or written about. If you found her last film to be of interest (or really any of them), then Die My Love will continue to provide the brand of experiential psychological studies you're likely craving; if you've never tried one of her films before, then this is a reasonable representation of her many talents to give a first try.

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