Lynne Ramsay depicts a young woman experiencing the perils of motherhood at great length with the help of a feral performance by Jennifer Lawrence and intimate/expansive images by DP Seamus McGarvey, in their second collaboration after We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011).
Short on backstories in typical Ramsay fashion, Die My Love is mostly told visually, from a young woman's perspective as she goes through a postpartum depression. Grace (Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson) are a young couple, moving into an old fixer-upper farm house in the countryside that belonged to Jackson's relative. The house is all covered in old wall papers and has rat problems. No matter, the young couple is enthusiastic to start a life together and Grace soon becomes pregnant with a son. Left alone to her own devices while her partner Jackson is away for a job in the city half of the time, Grace's daily life, bored and living in her own head, veers dangerously into fantasy territory.
Foreshadowing with Grace roaming around the yard on all fours with a kitchen knife in her hand, Ramsay makes a point that the film is not about Grace suffering from depression, but how a young woman is perceived when she behaves outside societal norms.
Grace does act irrational and compulsive - throwing herself through the glass window while arguing with Jackson, strips to her underwear and jumps into the kitty pool at a party, fantasizes about a married neighbor (LaKeith Stanfield). Family and friends are left helpless, not knowing how to help her. And the film shows how normal society deals with a 'difficult woman' - either marry her or institutionalize her. Jackson does both, but that doesn't fix Grace.
Filled with many details and nuances with McGarvey's 4:3 ratio shot images simultaneously confining and expansive, and great supporting cast- Pattinson as wide eyed, frustrated partner, the great Sissy Spacek as Jackson's sleepwalking, shotgun totting mom and the only person who understands Grace (reminiscent of her character in Badlands) and Nick Nolte as Jackson's dementia suffering dad, Die My Love is a great film about suffocating conformity of a life of a young woman. I really liked it.
