“Die my love” is smaller than life
Meanwhile, it has been revealed that Jackson is not just a perfect husband. Brings a dog into the house without asking; He keeps a box of condoms in his glove compartment but can’t articulate his story about it; He unsympathetically expects Grace to keep the house while he is at work; He angrily accuses her of embarrassing him in front of his friends. A turbulent relationship, combined with other stresses in her life—motherhood, loneliness, unfulfilled desire, artistic frustration, and perhaps undiagnosed mental illness—pushes her over the edge. She talks to a teddy bear, licks the window, sits in an open refrigerator, and spits beer on the floor. She leaves the house a mess, lets the dishes and laundry pile up, and only shops for instant macaroni and cheese. She gratuitously insults the young cashier and sparks a scene at a party. She threw herself through a glass door (injuring her face and limbs, requiring a hospital stay) and demolished the bathroom to its fixtures. She hits her head on a mirror and is admitted to a mental health facility. The reason is never clear: she speaks with a therapist, who mines her account of being orphaned as a child and diagnoses her fear of abandonment. But has she been diagnosed with postpartum depression, or even psychosis? Is the medication prescribed? The film offers no clue.
Instead, Ramsay emphasizes the physical fury of Grace’s torment. It’s not just the details of her writing life, her daily activities or inactivity, Jackson’s work, Grace’s relationships outside the home, and the medical details of her self-harming actions that the film ignores. In the party scene with Jackson’s friends, Grace is shown with her fingers covered in bandages—an obvious result of her violent bathroom encounter—while there is no immediate outcome to this frenetic destruction, no view of her and Jackson more calmly tending to her injuries, and no sense of what they say to each other afterward. After Grace hurls herself through a glass door – not so much an actual motive as a sudden shock to viewers – she is then seen in the hospital, and without any intervention from Jackson to stop the bleeding, call an ambulance, bring her to the hospital alone, and watch her enter the emergency room, talking to the doctor. Ramsay’s vision of violence is narrow, limited, and banal, stuck at the banal level of jump scares and wide-eyed terror, with none of the hesitant chill of chaotic aftermath, and the fragile, practical calm in the face of pain and danger. There is no point in thinking about what happened even if the damage to the body and soul has not yet been assessed and taken care of. Ramsay strives for extreme physicality and offers sheer excitement.
On the other hand, the film’s mosaic-like blending of time frames is its most satisfying and accomplished feature. It may be unclear whether flashbacks, such as the couple’s turbulent wedding and their hot and tumultuous courtship, are Grace’s memories, or, in fact, whether some scenes (such as the one with the biker) depict her actual actions or merely her fantasies. However, this free arrangement of time at least constitutes a framework for subjectivity, and points in the direction of the mental world that underlies action. Whether this complex structure is developed in the text or in the editing room (the editor is Tony Froschhammer), it is far more absorbing than the specific elements he juxtaposes.
What’s been missing all along, with this suppression of practical applications in favor of shock and excitement, is imagination. Ramsay immerses her story in the extraordinary and can’t be bothered by the dramatic in the ordinary elements of her characters’ lives. For that matter, there’s no clue as to when the film was filmed (the cars look modern but no one does anything with smartphones except make calls) or where (I notice a car with a Montana license plate). There’s never any suggestion as to what might be going on in the wider world or what these characters think about it. Hardly a Word About Money: Jackson shows up with a new car, and when Grace asks if they can afford it, he replies, “Don’t worry about it.” (Never had to worry about that before.) In the absence of meaningful conversation or observational curiosity, the movie’s scenes end quickly, last long enough to deliver their information, and enough of them to validate a plot point or salient theme.
As an exploration of the risks of postpartum on women’s mental health, “Die My Love” does the subject matter a disservice — it ignores the medical details and forms and prospects of treatment. The film raises these risks and subjects them to a public and social existential vision of women’s frustrations and enslavement in marriage. For the record, Ramsay declared, shortly after the film’s premiere at Cannes in May, that “the whole postpartum thing is just bullshit,” adding, “It’s about the breakdown of a relationship, it’s about the breakdown of love, the breakdown of sex after you have a baby. And it’s also about creative blockage.” Directors have power over their intentions, not their outcomes, and the film proves to be about much more than it intended — even if it does very little with its many themes.
In the absence of substantively written characters, actors take their place; Far from interpreting or embodying the “Die My Love” characters, the actors are forced to emulate them. Ramsay puts the workload on the cast – and especially on Lawrence, who pushes himself hard but is given little to work with – both in script material and in sustained screen time to develop scenes beyond their mere informational value. Her performance is intensely committed, but each scene plays as an exercise in its own right, drifting in abstraction, animated only by the force of her will. The result is an overwrought performance, not because Lawrence lacks pace or spontaneity — far from it — but because the writing and direction give her little to engage with. Her creative machinery, left unengaged, whirrs wildly, resulting in a scene of frenetic effort that takes the place of drama.