Die My Love Review: Prove You Are Alive

Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love gives Jennifer Lawrence the ammunition to deliver one of the most uninhibited, raw performances of the past decade.

Die My Love opens with Grace (Jennifer Lawrence, of No Hard Feelings) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson, of Mickey 17), a couple expecting their first child and moving into the house that was left to Jackson in his uncle’s will. The couple has left New York to move to this house in Montana that is relatively isolated from society but only a few miles away from Jackson’s recently widowed mother Pam (Sissy Spacek, of Dying for Sex).

Grace and Jackson’s connection is pure and at its most intensive, animalistic. They are completely devoted to one another and while Grace is hesitant about the move to Montana, she understands that their presence will help their family grieve the loss of Pam’s husband and Jackson’s father, Harry (Nick Nolte, of Warrior). 

After Grace gives birth to her son, her days begin to blend together in a miserable symphony of boredom. Jackson’s job puts him on the road for days at a time and while Grace is a writer, she feels creatively stuck. While she loves her son, she begins to feel a growing sense of doom and impatience as if she is disappearing right before her very eyes and there is nothing she can do to stop it. 

As her relationship with Jackson begins to suffer due to Grace’s feeling of isolation, she begins to spiral and descend further into the depths of her own mind as she fights for any way to prove to herself she is alive. 

Die My Love masterfully paints a picture of what it feels like to watch your identity slip away from yourself. Jennifer Lawrence is at her absolute best as she portrays Grace’s desperate pleas to be seen in the midst of her suffering, while Robert Pattinson hits the nail on the head as her partner trying and failing to figure out how to give her what she needs. 

Grace feels like she is watching herself disappear. She’s moved to a house, town and state that is a stranger to her. She has no community surrounding her outside of a husband who has to go away for days at a time for work and a mother-in-law lost in her own grief. Her sense of self is slowly, but definitely, becoming both intertwined and overtaken by her role as a mother. 

When Grace becomes a mother, the electricity of her life begins to dull. Her husband is no longer an enthusiastic participant in her spontaneous sexual trysts. Her creative spark has sizzled out, keeping her from the passion that fuels her inner world. Her identity as Grace feels muted as compared to her title of mother. 

Die My Love never discounts Grace’s genuine love for her child, but rather focuses on how her postpartum experience leaves her feeling completely isolated and how it changes her relationship with the world around her. While she loves her son, in becoming a mother, she can’t figure out how the titles of caretaker and individual can coexist with one person. 

It’s a tragedy that her role as a mother has made her feel more deeply than she ever has in her life before, but in the same breath, she feels like she has completely disconnected from everything rooted in reality. 

She is constantly trying to prove that she is alive. She tries to embrace her libido and her physicality to create proof of life under the enormous weight of motherhood that is smothering her identity. She slams her head into the mirror, scratches at the wallpaper until she’s bleeding and crawls on the grass to feel connected to the plane she exists on. 

It is in this exploration of what it means to be and prove that you are alive, Jennifer Lawrence gives what is sure to be the definitive performance of the year. Lawrence has a fiery intensity and a rich ability to let audiences into her character’s highly nuanced interior world as reality blurs around her. As you are watching the film, you understand you are seeing one of the great film stars of this generation at the absolute top of their game, performing the role they were born to play. 

The creative collaboration between Ramsay, Lawrence and Pattinson feels kismet. Ramsay’s direction creates a degree of freedom that allows Lawrence and Pattinson the space to explore the world of Die My Love fearlessly. They so effortlessly build off one another and are able to quickly establish a deep love between their characters that grounds the world the film exists in. 

Outside of being a film about postpartum depression’s effect on a woman’s identity, it explores the ways it enters the lifeblood of parents’ relationships. As Grace spirals further into the depths of her postpartum depression, Jackson has no idea how to throw her a lifeline. He stands by as he watches her drown without any concept of how to save her. 

By no means is Jackson the perfect husband, but there is no doubt that their relationship is a massive part of both of their identities. Both Jackson and Grace see this as a moment in time they will be able to move past, but have no clue how they are going to be able to do so. Pattinson perfectly executes the role of a man at a loss of hope, unable to help the person they love most, but desperate to try and save their relationship. 

Grace views her postpartum depression as an intruder that has entered her relationship, another entity crowded her identity. She has no idea how to overcome this element of her mental health, but desperately wants to go back to how easy it was to be with her husband before giving birth. It’s in this struggle that Lawrence is able to portray the visceral and intangible struggle of womanhood. Grace is a character that is full of rage and joy and love and hatred and all of these conflicting emotions that coexist within her that she struggles to make sense of.

Ramsay’s Die My Love is a homage to women struggling to make peace with the plethora of emotions that come along with motherhood. It’s an artful commentary on the ways in which mothers struggle with their sense of identity amidst an onslaught of postpartum depression and an acknowledgement of the massive hardship women who suffer from this go through. Lawrence’s performance is fearless. It accentuates her deep understanding of the conflicting and challenging emotions that accompany the difficulties of motherhood at its most intensive. 

Die My Love premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 17-18, 2025.