Die My Love

Die My Love is not a movie. It has all the necessary ingredients of a movie. Actors, sets, lighting, and so on. But it is not a movie. It is also -- if you want to parse words and their assumed meanings -- not a film (or a Film). It aspires to be. It wears this aspiration on its sleeves, its chest, and maybe a jaunty hat too. It is trying, with everything it has, to be taken seriously, because It Has Something To Say, and it wants to do so with as much flourish and pageantry as possible. Die My Love wants to be Art, with a capital A the size of the Hollywood sign. It wants to let you know it has Deep, Profound, Meaningful Thoughts on motherhood, marriage, and the depths of post-partum depression. And the direction and acting are doing all they can to convince you of this. Jennifer Lawrence is doing all she can to portray a mother in the throes of PPD. Robert Pattinson is doing all he can to portray the helpless husband. Cinematography Seamus McGarvey and editor Toni Froschhammer are doing all they can with the visuals to give this movie life. And Lynne Ramsay is interpreting the movie's title like an instruction on how to approach to directing it, because her direction obliterates any impact Die My Love have. Under her murderous direction, Die My Love doesn't take any of the paths available to the slow psychological spin-out of a new mother living in the middle of nowhere. Ramsay approaches the subject matter like a college thesis instead of a story. "Our subject begins losing connection to activities she enjoys, progressing to a generalized but unspecified anxiety, disconnecting from loved ones, engaging in increasingly risky behavior, escalating into self-harm in a physical and mental capacity." You can almost feel a one-way mirror between you and the movie and people in lab coats around you as the head of the study force-feeds you data points. There is no beating heart to be found in any of these characters or its dry, mechanical progression through the steps of unchecked PPD. Now, I am aware that depression doesn't mean crying and screaming and an emotional roller-coaster all the time. Numbness is also a manifestation of depression. But once the signs begin, Pattinson is pretty much numb all the time too. There's a chain of events that results in the family dog (whom she hates) being mortally wounded. Lawrence, without a shred of emotion and in the middle of the night, walks into town, gets her mother-in-law's shotgun, walks back, takes the dog into a field, and ends its misery. The next morning, she watches from inside as Pattinson digs a grave. When he looks at her, he's not furious or heartbroken or anything. I know Pattinson is capable of acting. I've seen it. But you'd never know it from the direction here, which was seemingly "stare at her as if you're staring into the middle distance". The whole movie is infected with this hollowness. It wants you to know what PPD is, it wants you to see how it can manifest, but it absolutely, positively, under no circumstances wants you to feel even a trace of it. There's no attempt to build sympathy for the mother suffering from it, nor for her partner trying and failing to navigate it. Die My Love's script feels more like a crime scene report. It doesn't help that there is an almost allergic aversion to giving these characters any depth or backstory. Lawrence's Grace is said to be a writer. Has she been published, or was this just one possible life path she was trying out? What does she write? How passionate was she about her project? How far along was she? Hope you like not getting answers, because the movie could not care less about their lives pre-Montana. We never get to know Grace and Jackson without the baby, so we have no frame of reference to see how their lives have changed and feel anything about it. The same applies for Jackson; we're told he's gone for three or four days at a time, seemingly on the road, but what does he do? Does he enjoy it? Was this a job he already had, or did he take it up when they got to Montana? Don't bother asking, you know the answer is a blank stare. It further doesn't help that this refusal to give answers on things is Die My Love's operating philosophy, to both the script and the visuals. Why does Grace dance with her father-in-law in the middle of a forest? Why does he commit suicide? What's with the crawling on all fours? How does she know where the motorcycle rider lives? If she hasn't been writing as is mentioned multiple times, where does the book at the end come from? Was Jackson having an affair? How did the authorities not get involved after she threw herself through a sliding glass door? So many scenes and so many shots go nowhere or leave something unsaid, undone, or unfinished. It feels like weirdness for the sake of itself, or a desperate attempt to inject some kind of life into this bloodless event. PPD is a very serious subject that, even in 2026, doesn't get as much attention as it deserves. I've seen it first-hand, not to the self-destructive degree Die My Love goes to, but definitely the malaise, the aimlessness, and the disconnect. Die My Love isn't interested in shining a light on PPD in the way it needs. It wants to use it to show a series of escalating but redundant events in a woman's life where she detonates everything she has and loves. The way it goes through with so little emotion, you'd swear it was propaganda from some child-hating sociopath trying to scare anyone from ever having children. But even that would require emotion, and Die My Love has none to give. It couldn't care less if it had any in the first place. It comes from the same school of thought that brought the world similar works like Promising Young Woman and Don't Worry Darling, movies more interested in pointing in the general direction of a serious topic that deserves cinematic representation and saying "look, it exists" than actually engaging with it. Die My Love is every Twitter chud and angsty teenager that thinks boiling down an argument against something to a simplistic sentence like "all religion is mind-control" is a linguistic knock-out. It is not interested in treating PPD or anyone within its sphere of influence with respect, reverence, care, or compassion. It could've, had this handled by a director who actually gave a damn, but instead, the movie reduces PPD and itself to a series of bullet points. Well, bullets have only one purpose, and they carry out that grim duty with Die My Love long before the credits roll.