'Die My Love' Review: Jennifer Lawrence Spirals Into Psychosis While Robert Pattinson Plunges Into Despair in Lynne Ramsay’s Jarring Character Study
In Die My Love, Lynne Ramsay delivers her most haunting and unflinching film to date. Adapted from Ariana Harwicz’s searing debut novel, the Cannes 2025 competition title plunges into the disturbed psyche of a woman teetering between feral desire, isolation, and mental collapse.
Jennifer Lawrence in 'Die My Love.'
Courtesy of Cannes Film Festival
Jennifer Lawrence embodies Grace with unnerving ferocity—a mother hollowed by postpartum trauma, who stalks through her rural home like a caged animal. Her grip on reality loosens as her marriage to Jackson (Robert Pattinson) decays under the weight of neglect, longing, and disconnection. Ramsay crafts a narrative of emotional and psychological disintegration, where love becomes indistinguishable from desperation.
Pattinson, in one of his most quietly affecting roles, plays Jackson as a man worn thin by grief and helplessness. Their scenes simmer with unease. Ramsay avoids sentimentality, instead exposing the raw nerves of a relationship slipping into quiet ruin.
Shot in a claustrophobic 4:3 aspect ratio by Seamus McGarvey, the film tightens its frame around Grace’s spiraling mind. Visuals are stripped-down and intimate, with jarring transitions, nonlinear sequencing, and eerie symbolism—blurring time, memory, and hallucination. A mysterious biker (LaKeith Stanfield) enters Grace’s orbit, further warping the line between fantasy and infidelity.
Sissy Spacek and Nick Nolte offer nuanced support as Jackson’s aging parents—observers unable to stop the emotional erosion taking place around them. Ramsay offers no clean arcs. A baby cries endlessly. A shotgun reappears. A sing-along to Bowie’s “Kooks” provides fleeting warmth. And then: a forest fire, glimpsed in fragments, consuming everything in its path.
The film ends not with catharsis, but with emotional residue—pain, loss, survival. As Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” plays, sung by Ramsay herself, the film leaves behind a final, fragile echo of its core truth.
Die My Love is difficult and emotionally volatile, but it holds a quiet, ferocious clarity. Ramsay doesn’t romanticize suffering—she interrogates it. In doing so, she offers one of the most arresting works of Cannes 2025: a fearless portrait of motherhood, madness, and the dark corners of devotion.
