Die My Love

Director Lynne Ramsay has made a career out of exploring the messy, incomprehensible ways people grieve. She's fascinated by the drive to continue existing following the loss of a part of one's self, watching as her characters attempt to return to their normal lives or run away from what's happened, but never face it head on. Sometimes that's due to guilt, but just as often it stems from the inability to express the depth and complication of the emotions overwhelming their being, or reconcile them with what's socially acceptable. The result is hypnotic characters whose actions are almost aggressively alien to viewer despite understanding their source. As such, it's not the least bit surprising that Ramsay's tale of a woman raging against motherhood is so much more layered than most, and approached from a completely different angle.

The impressive range of experience to come is teased in the stark dissonance of the first two shots. The first is a long, placid image looking down multiple rooms of a house, empty save for the leaves blown in by time, as Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson) approach and then explore the space, criss-crossing our limited line of sight, yelling to each other from off screen. The camera never moves, save for a subtle zoom near the end of the scene. We then transition to a shaky, chaotic traipse through a forest, surrounded by fire, as the crunchy, droning sounds of Ben Frost's "Theory of Machines" crescendos to envelop us. Ramsay has laid out the beginning and the end of our journey to come, and in doing so has instructed us to carefully consider what really matters: everything in between.

For while this is a narrative film, it's not a straightforward one. Not in its timeline, which occasionally jumps into flashbacks, but more often finds itself rhyming with the described past, and thus confuses your sense of exactly when they're taking place. Not in its visuals, as we're privy to quite a few of Grace's "visions": whether dreams, hallucinations, fantasies, or something else entirely is rarely clear, even as we come to view them as manifestations of her inner turmoil. They parallel those of Jackson's mom Pam (Sissy Spacek), who lives down the road and has taken to sleepwalking outdoors while bearing a shotgun. Its emotional story is the most consistently advancing element, but you'd be hard pressed to call it traditional from any but the most abstract of perspectives.

Grace's newborn drastically changes her life in many of the ways recognizable to moviegoers, but it slowly becomes clear that her outlook is less so. While you can be forgiven for initially mistaking her destructive, violent, and erratic behavior as resentment of her infant son and a desire to break free of the responsibilities his life has imposed upon her, it's notable that her rage is directed almost anywhere else. Primarily (and justifiably) at her husband, whose multi-day absences to pay the bills quickly cause suspicions of philandering, especially as their fiery, animalistic lovemaking has disappeared behind a cloud of excuses, no matter how aggressively and nakedly she hurls herself at him. To say nothing of his general emotional distance or selfishness, as all his attention goes to their son at the expense of her. But it doesn't require another to trigger her outbursts; a plane, or a passing biker, or even just a glance out of the window can serve as the impetus for an outburst. Or most shockingly, a dog.

Ramsay's adaptation of Ariana Harwicz's novel feels like a rebuttal to the deluge of recent movies and TV and books and podcasts and TED talks that assume every parent secretly regrets having kids, at least sometimes. We've gone from the expectation that parents smile through every sleepless night and near-miss disaster as if their child is a perfect angel, to assuming any difficulty in their life stems from their spawn in some way. While I never got the sense Die My Love is dismissing such a shift, its primal scream seems intended to claim space for an alternative viewpoint, that it's others' shifting perception of you that's most damaging, that the label of "parent" (especially "mother") strangles your own identity and personhood within an inch of its life. It's why she's so excited by the silent gaze of their neighbor Karl (LaKeith Stanfield). As someone whose experience of her is entirely out of context, he cannot help but look at her as she is, and the reintroduction of that context is what eventually shatters the illusion.

The series of upsetting scenarios starts to get a bit repetitive, though, especially given the lack of solid ground to stand on. Ramsay doesn't reuse events, but at a certain point, the new situations serve more to torment Grace than to convey fresh layers of meaning to the audience. Lawrence's transcendent physical performance nearly makes up for it, and her distant and somewhat stilted line deliveries feel more apt as her trials deepen. But the lack of a clear path to the ending ensures you feel every minute of its nearly two hour runtime. Additionally, the surreal imagery never develops into anything bigger or more meaningful, leaving it a collection of visual ideas which actively resist the extraction of meaning.

But that's what makes such a work all the more beguiling. There's just enough going on beneath the surface to keep you staring into the abyss, certain there's value to be had if only you can push past the deliberately unpleasant and darkly comic proceedings. More then any other high profile release this year, it earns the descriptor "challenging", nearly guaranteeing its mediocre audience reception and lukewarm critical one. It demands repeat viewings to give up its secrets, despite its complete disinterest in making that prospect appealing. Such an approach to filmmaking is what makes every project helmed by Ramsay so exciting, while ensuring she'll remain revered only by the sickos.