LFF Review: ‘Die My Love’
Jennifer Lawrence’s performance in Die My Love needs to be seen to be believed. Ferocious, frightening and completely uninhibited, it is the kind of turn that reminds you just how extraordinary she can be when given material willing to push her somewhere genuinely uncomfortable. Lawrence has rarely been this exposed on screen, delivering an earth-shattering, monumental performance that almost seems to exist somewhere beyond conventional ideas of what acting should look like.
Directed by Lynne Ramsay, Die My Love is an intentionally difficult film, one that refuses to make its central character’s experience easy to understand or digest. Lawrence plays a new mother slowly unraveling under the weight of postpartum depression, isolation and a growing sense that the person she once was is slipping further and further out of reach. Ramsay does not attempt to neatly explain what is happening to her, instead placing the audience directly inside an increasingly fractured state of mind where desire, resentment, love and despair begin bleeding into one another.
Lawrence throws herself into that instability with astonishing force. There is something almost primal about the performance, particularly in the way she uses her physicality. Her entire body seems to become an extension of the character’s deteriorating emotional state, whether she is moving through a room with restless, unpredictable energy or sitting completely still as something appears to be breaking apart behind her eyes. There is anger here, but also desperation, confusion and an overwhelming loneliness that Lawrence never allows to become one-note.
It is a performance that could have very easily tipped into something mannered or overly theatrical, but Lawrence somehow makes even the film’s most heightened moments feel painfully truthful. She is funny one moment and terrifying the next, sometimes shifting between the two within the same scene. Ramsay gives her room to be ugly, impulsive and difficult without ever asking the audience to reduce the character to her illness. The result is a portrait of postpartum depression that feels chaotic because the experience itself is chaotic, refusing to sanitize motherhood into something more palatable.
Robert Pattinson has the considerably harder job. His character is frustratingly underwritten, particularly in comparison to Lawrence’s. We understand his confusion and helplessness in the face of what is happening, but the screenplay rarely gives him enough interiority of his own, leaving him in danger of becoming little more than another element orbiting around Lawrence’s character. In another actor’s hands, the imbalance could have rendered him almost entirely anonymous.
Pattinson, however, injects the role with enough pathos to elevate what is on the page. There is a sadness to his performance that suggests far more than the script ever explicitly gives him, particularly in the small moments where his character seems torn between wanting to help and having absolutely no idea how. Pattinson is at his most effective when he is simply reacting to Lawrence, allowing bewilderment, exhaustion and hurt to register without overwhelming the scene. He cannot entirely solve the character’s lack of development, but he gives him enough humanity to ensure the relationship never feels completely one-sided.
That relationship is where much of Die My Love finds its most interesting material. The film understands that postpartum depression does not exist in isolation, and that love alone is not always enough to bridge the distance that can form between two people when one of them no longer recognizes themselves. Ramsay refuses to turn either character into a villain, which allows the ugliness of their dynamic to feel much more honest. There are moments of genuine tenderness between them, which only make the emotional violence elsewhere more painful. The film itself can be considerably harder to embrace.
There is an abrasive quality to Die My Love that feels entirely purposeful, with Ramsay constantly pushing the audience away before finding unexpected ways to pull them back in. But intention does not always equal execution. The screenplay needed more time in the oven, particularly when it comes to fleshing out some of its relationships and giving the film’s ideas more room to develop beyond the sheer force of its central performance.
At times, the film appears to assume that abstraction alone will create depth, when a little more clarity would have made some of its emotional blows land even harder. Ramsay’s images are striking and Lawrence is more than capable of carrying the audience through the gaps, but there are moments where the film feels as though it is withholding simply for the sake of withholding. Still, Die My Love ultimately rewards those willing to get on its wavelength.
This is not an easy film, nor is it trying to be. Ramsay wants the audience to feel destabilized, trapped and occasionally alienated, mirroring a woman who increasingly feels like a stranger inside her own life. Once you surrender to that rhythm, the film becomes a fascinating, often deeply uncomfortable examination of motherhood and postpartum depression, particularly the gulf that can exist between what women are told motherhood should feel like and the far messier reality of actually living through it.
The script may not always be as developed as the performances deserve, but Lawrence is simply undeniable. It is one of those performances so enormous, so committed and so emotionally raw that the entire film seems to bend around it. Die My Love is messy, challenging and occasionally frustrating, but perhaps some of that messiness is inseparable from what Ramsay is trying to capture. And even when the film struggles to articulate itself, Lawrence never does.
Rating: 3.5/5
Hamnet screened at the 2025 BFI London Film Festival.
Ahmad W.
Aspiring critic and poster designer.