Jennifer Lawrence Gets to Act Her Age in Die, My Love

Die, My Love made me think about that stretch of time in the 2010s in which Jennifer Lawrence made the leap from playing a teenager to playing a wife in the space of a year. In 2012, she starred as 16-year-old Katniss Everdeen in the first The Hunger Games, then as Bradley Cooper’s widowed love interest in David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook six months later. Russell went on to cast her as Christian Bale’s unhappy wife in American Hustle the next year, then as Long Island matriarch turned QVC queen Joy Mangano in Joy in 2015. It was as though movie stars had become such a scarce commodity that Russell had no choice but to conscript Lawrence, who was indisputably one of those anointed few, even if she didn’t entirely make sense in the roles he was putting her in. And she was good in those movies, but it was impossible to set aside the awareness that Lawrence was playing women who’ve done a lot more living than she’d yet had a chance to.

Lawrence took a brief hiatus from the screen a few years ago, and there’s been an obvious intentionality to the parts she’s taken since, which have included two in films she’s produced herself. But no recent role has felt more like a declaration of the kind of actor she wants to be than the one she plays in Die, My Love, the new film from Lynne Ramsay that premiered at Cannes, based on a novel by Ariana Harwicz. As Grace, a woman experiencing a breakdown in the wake of the birth of her first child and a move out of the city into the rural area where her husband grew up, Lawrence is alight with an elemental chaos, breaking apart in such a way that it feels like the world is what’s gone wrong, and not her character. Ramsay’s is a postpartum phantasmagoria of mundane and fantastic imagery, a movie that doesn’t go somewhere so much as it runs right off a cliff, and it’s Lawrence who holds its pieces together. She had to grow into the part — the fact that it was shot between the births of her two children adds an extra dimension — and she throws herself to it with an exhilarating, full-body commitment.

Die, My Love begins with Grace and her husband Jackson (Robert Pattinson) taking over a house that used to belong to his uncle. She is, we’re told, a writer, while he’s a musician who takes a job that will take him away from their home for long stretches of time. Dancing and drinking in between bouts of cleaning, they writhe together on the floor like tussling animals before stripping down to have sex. They’re people who still see themselves as wild and free, even as Grace turns up pregnant in the next shot, bopping along to the chugging guitars in what now looks like a home. Then their child has arrived, and Grace is slinking on all fours through the grass, exuding a ferity that doesn’t read as playful anymore, especially given the way she’s carrying a knife. It’s for a cake — the baby is six months old — but we can already feel that something is off, and the giddiness of the pair’s dynamic has shifted into something less predictable and no longer in sync. She develops a habit of falling into a thousand-yard stare. Jackson is unable to follow Grace to the place that she’s gone to, and doesn’t appear willing to understand it, either. Instead, she starts drifting outside into the woods after nighttime feedings, where she has encounters with a black horse and a helmeted motorcycle rider who may or may not be figments from her own increasingly untrustworthy brain.

This being a Lynne Ramsay production, Die, My Love is a lot stranger and more stylistically lush than films like Tully and Nightbitch that occupy similar territory. You do get the feeling Ramsay doesn’t always have a full handle on what she’s going for — that motorcyclist, who turns out to be a neighbor played by LaKeith Stanfield, is part of a side plot so fragmentary as to be almost impossible to parse. The whole final section of the film resists a clear reading, including a wedding that might be a flashback, but which also connects directly to a hospital stay that is definitely set in the present day. But through it all, Lawrence prowls like a caged tiger, daring everyone around her to acknowledge the unhappiness that makes her want to retreat from the world and to blow it all up at the same time. She exudes such a gravitational force that she curves all the other performances in the film around her energy, with Pattinson a whiny, ineffectual boy in her orbit, and Sissy Spacek quietly concerned but in decline herself as Jackson’s mother. Die, My Love skims over the expected points about the unjust expectations we put on mothers for something more personal to Grace, who simmers with a general fury whose source she couldn’t name. Some of it has to do with Jackson, some of it herself, and some with the world that’s done this to her, and that dares extend a hand in concern after the fact. It’s not a film that fully works, but it’s a performance that’s monumental — and very grown up.