Lawrence relentlessly plays a mother with postpartum depression that becomes increasingly serious.
What's going on in the mind of a young mother facing postpartum depression after the birth of her first child? The Drama “Die My Love” with Jennifer Lawrence (35) and Robert Pattinson (39) pursues this question ruthlessly. Lynne Ramsay's film adaptation of Ariana Harwicz's novel does not serve as classic entertainment – but it does serve as an important lesson in empathy.
Sadness instead of family idyll – that's what it's all about
Young couple Grace (Lawrence) and Jackson (Pattinson) have just moved into an old house in the country. Grace settles into her new surroundings with the goal of writing a Great American Novel. But soon the two have a baby and their lives change radically. As Jackson is suspiciously absent and the pressure of family life grows ever greater on Grace, she begins to visibly fall apart – leaving a trail of devastation in her wake.
Your most personal film
Jennifer Lawrence has shown many times in her Oscar-winning career that she has no vanity when she takes on a role. But you've never seen them as raw, sometimes even animalistic, as in “Die My Love”. Again and again she crawls along the ground like a predator – as if she didn't know whether she wanted to bite her throat or bite her love. In other scenes she appears caring, vulnerable and driven by self-doubt.
The actress mentioned several times in interviews that after the birth of her second child, like the main character Grace, she suffered from postpartum depression. When it came to her son, who was born in 2025, she thought “every time he slept that he was dead,” said the Oscar winner in an interview with “The New Yorker.” “I thought he was crying because he didn't like his life, me or his family. I thought I was doing everything wrong and destroying my children.”
A filmmaker with a penchant for imagery and heavy subject matter
Director Lynne Ramsay likes to tackle difficult topics. She already proved this with the film adaptation of the amok novel “We Need to Talk About Kevin”, and the 2018 revenge film “You Were Never Really Here” with Joaquin Phoenix was about sex trafficking and child molesters.
What “Die My Love” has in common with the latter film is that both works do not rely on a stringent narrative structure and more on expressive imagery. It doesn't quite reach the dimensions of Terrence Malick. However, there are clear parallels in terms of the preferred aesthetic of “The Tree of Life” director, who often prefers to let his audience experience rather than truly understand.
Who can we even trust?
In her new film, Ramsay uses a creative trick that viewers last saw in Florian Zeller's “The Father”. As in the 2020 dementia drama, in “Die My Love” we experience the world through the affected person's kaleidoscope of emotions. Over the course of the film, Grace's postpartum depression increasingly develops into a psychosis, which the audience feels firsthand, so to speak.
This distorted perception is represented, for example, by auditory sensory impressions. Something is constantly whirring and humming loudly in the background, and the family dog that Jackson bought and then neglected seems to bark and whine 24/7. Is that really the case? The audience can only speculate about this. At least that's how Grace perceives it – and we with her.
Although “Die My Love” is at its core an impressive one-woman show from Lawrence, Pattinson also gets the opportunity to demonstrate his acting skills. The child's father is also increasingly overwhelmed by the situation, fluctuating between love for his family and moments in which he seems to have downright disgust for them – mind you, again from Grace's perspective. The oppressive message: Sometimes life presents challenges in which everyone involved feels they can do nothing right, but can do a lot wrong.
Conclusion
Before going to the cinema, it should be clear to everyone that “Die My Love” really doesn't claim to be entertaining. The film is still worth seeing, precisely because, like “The Father”, it helps to better understand the behavior and fears of the people affected, in this case a young mother with postpartum depression. That it ends with an ultimately empathetic “Just pull yourself together!” is not done, on the contrary.