There is no one who can cast a spell quite like Lynne Ramsay. Be it in a portrait of a mother reeling from the fact that her son committed a violent act or a study of the world’s loneliest mercenary who gets caught up in a conspiracy, it’s less about the “what” of the story than the manner in which she tells it. Her latest, the confined “Die, My Love’ starring Robert Pattinson and Jennifer Lawrence as a loving couple whose world begins to rapidly unravel, is no different. A film that falls again under the banner of “domestic horror” like “We Need to Talk About Kevin, “Die, My Love” is about seeing the way a small crack in the psyche can splinter outwards until everything shatters. While not always as measured as her past work and often a little rough around the edges on a technical level, the moments where Ramsay strips away all the noise to immerse us in the more unsettling experiential elements makes it a welcome return for the filmmaker.
Building up to the Cannes Film Festival, one of the biggest questions was whether the director, who first made an incredible debut at the festival back in 1999 with “Ratcatcher,” would be returning with this newest work. By no means the most prolific of filmmakers, Ramsay’s inclusion immediately made “Die, My Love” one of the most anticipated films of the festival. While this level of expectation and the high bar she has set for herself could work against the often rather flawed “Die, My Love,” there is still so much that is worth appreciating in the rich details of the remote world that she explores. Even as it can increasingly start to feel a little scattered as it approaches a shaky finale, the journey to get there offers plenty of Ramsay at her best.
Premiering Saturday in the festival’s main competition, it first introduces us to the couple of Grace (Lawrence) and Jackson (Pattinson) as they begin a move into their new home. While this could sound like the setup to a more conventional horror film, the way Ramsay shoots this opening holds us at an intriguing distance with a wide shot where we see the beaten down house that will become the film’s primary location. We then get hurled headlong into a series of scenes between the couple where they almost begin to attack each other in shared sexual reverie. It’s an intoxicatingly shot introduction that immediately convinces us of the couple’s deep passion for one another, which then makes the rest of the film that much more agonizing as the two grow further and further apart.
Specifically, the couple having a baby upends their lives and leaves each of them with vastly different day-to-day experiences. Where Jackson goes away to work frequently, Grace is left entirely at home where she begins to grow “bored of the universe,” as she bitterly says at one point. Though she was once a writer, all of her waking hours are now consumed with caring for their child almost entirely alone. When Jackson then brings home a dog without asking, any quiet that she could have hoped to have in her house evaporates in an instant. As we feel via the all-consuming sound design, Grace is never able to have a moment of peace. It’s Ramsay’s version of the recent “Nightbitch,” complete with Lawrence walking on all fours and barking like a dog, though instead of sanding off the rougher edges of motherhood as that film did, she sharpens them so it all cuts right to the bone.
Both Pattinson and Lawrence are outstanding in their roles — the latter becomes a protagonist of sorts while the other is a pseudo-antagonist. We can see the anger, fear and isolation in their every move, with the vacancy that exists behind their eyes proving to be the most chilling part of the whole affair. It’s like we’re seeing the ghosts of who each of them were getting left behind by the bodies that are just going through the motions, living a life that may just be the thing that destroys them. This primarily falls on Grace as the isolation, buzzing of flies, and the general sense that she is wasting away starts to consume her from the inside out.
There are big moments of shocking violence where this comes to a head, including a scene where Lawrence throws herself through a glass door. There’s an off-kilter humor that Ramsay, working from a script she co-wrote with Enda Walsh, weaves in and out of the film. Many of the interactions Grace has with the people that she encounters in her day to day, while bound up in rage, are also darkly funny. It’s not at the expense of her character or the suffering she is experiencing. Instead, it’s about the dark absurdity of the waking existential nightmare that has come to define all aspects of her life. For much of the beginning of the film, this is all captured with a quite self-assured, confident hand.
Unfortunately, things start to fray in ways the film doesn’t quite have a handle on as we get into the middle stretch. An affair Grace has feels only half-baked, which could come down to the fact that it may not be entirely real in the way we imagine, and ultimately just wastes the presence of the always magnetic LaKeith Stanfield. There are some distracting technical flourishes in this stretch as well, including an awkward use of day-for-night cinematography. But these are small missteps for what remains an intriguing work.
As we see Grace become more distant from life, you find yourself being drawn in by Ramsay’s spell. The rhythms of the home, equal parts mundane and maddening, is what gives the film its power. You are constantly looking for a way out, but none is coming as the film keeps ratcheting up the quiet sense of tension until you can hardly stand it. Even as it’s not Ramsay’s best film, even a minor work from the filmmaker is still better than just about any other director. There remains a haunting power that she’s able to wield over her audience.
