Die My Love
Director ~ Lynne Ramsay
Writers ~ Enda Walsh, Lynne Ramsay, Alice Birch
2025 ~ United Kingdom, Canada, United States
Stars ~ Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Pattinson, Sissy Spacek
The title, packaging and trailer may mislead into expecting a noirish thriller, but it is not that. One of those films that equates mental illness with rebelliousness and romanticism. This means Jennifer Lawrence is always acting-up, crawling around on all fours like she’s auditioning for sexy ‘Cats’, or poking her tongue out at a mounted deer head and incapable of chewing gum or writing in a journal without it being in the most annoying manner. This is a character who can’t pass a piano alone without pressing a key, whose every social scene in public will be an embarrassment. It doesn’t help that a lot of the context is set at aggravating, to convey depression and assaulted senses, with a dog’s default as Constant Barking or Whining and the song choices leaning towards the twee, although the John Pine needledrop hits the mark.
Sissy Spacek serves as both unhinged by grief and then the sage of feminist empathy, although the inconsistency does fit with her belief that women experience phases of temporary madness. Pattinson must rage against the pretences, but he has no hope: the first images we see of the love of his life is her flopping to herself in an empty room and prowling with a knife on all fours from afar with passionate intent, so she is already coded as acting for herself. We don’t really get a sense of what’s at stake, just that she’s not right: we aren’t informed where we’ve come from and the temporal play doesn’t truly assist us with a starting point.
There is nothing to object to with Ramsay’s direction, dreamy and fragmented, slightly oblique, but it is arguably ill-fitting garb to the subject matter. Surely life experience relegates romanticising suffering to teenage inexperience. Reducing Jennifer Lawrence’s performance to constantly pointing to itself and mental illness to the vision of a forest fire offers no insight or help: we can fathom where this is going. These things are not romantic or poetic.
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