Die My Love

I came out of Die, My Love feeling wrung out and weirdly wired, like I’d just watched someone’s nervous system projected on to a screen. Ramsay takes Ariana Harwicz’s novel and sticks Grace in a remote Montana house with a baby, a bad family history and a brain quietly turning against her. It’s about bipolar spirals, postnatal dread and that horrible feeling that the real horror film is happening inside your own head. You’re not allowed a safe distance; you’re in the panic with her.

Jennifer Lawrence is astonishing. “Brave” usually gets wheeled out when someone takes their clothes off; she does that, but the real bravery is how far she lets Grace look needy, horny, petty, cruel and utterly lost. The dark comedy is brutal: car-park rows, car-sex ultimatums, boozy small talk that curdles into catastrophe. Robert Pattinson makes Jackson both exasperating and oddly sympathetic, and Sissy Spacek drifts in from next door as the ghost of total caregiver burnout. You can feel the mother! rawness and some of Kevin’s parental dread fused into one person.

Lynne Ramsay is, frankly, a national treasure and this is her working at full, feral strength. She directs like she’s got both hands round your throat: muscular sound design, saturated colour, music slams that feel like anxiety attacks. A fantasy lover on a motorbike and a few hallucination threads are a bit undercooked, and there’s at least one meltdown too many, but I’ll still take something this fierce and sensually alive over a dozen tasteful, well-behaved breakdown dramas.