Die My Love (2025)

A ticking bomb from its opening moments. At first, everything is fine with the young couple exploring their artistic and sexual desires. But parenthood looms as a source of pressure rather than desire or joy. Loneliness metastasises into estrangement, and estrangement curdles into emotional and psychological explosion.

Co-writer/producer/director Lynn Ramsay constructs a world where irritation becomes torment: the persistent buzz of a fly, a dog’s relentless barking, and an almost cruelly cheerful musical backdrop form an audiovisual assault that mirrors the protagonist’s internal collapse and her other half’s implosion. These sounds invade the film and are weaponised against both character and viewer. The contrast between surface normalcy and internal catastrophe is the film’s most unsettling strategy.

As the narrative expands to include an ageing couple grappling with the natural corrosion of body and mind, the film’s psychological tension deepens. Mental deterioration is not isolated to youth or motherhood; it is universal, inevitable, and terrifying. What emerges is a continuum of decay – mental, emotional, physical – suggesting that this is not an exception, but a trajectory. And this is how Ramsay decides to depict it.

From a filmmaking perspective, Seamus McGarvey’s day-for-night cinematography lends the world an unreal, dreamlike instability, as if even time itself is untrustworthy – a nod to Grace’s point of view. Toni Froschhammer’s editing complements this with rhythmic fractures and stutters, which manifest Grace’s mental state and create moments when coherence feels briefly unattainable – intentionally so.

The performances are just extraordinary. Jennifer Lawrence (also executive producer) delivers one of her most raw and exposed performances, while Robert Pattinson (also executive producer) continues his streak of unsettling, emotionally opaque roles. Sissy Spacek and Nick Nolte top up the devastation, embodying lives worn thin by time. Lakeith Stanfield, as always, adds gravity with minimal effort.

Ramsay once again proves her mastery in portraying psychological imbalance, echoing the shocking intensity of We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) and the existential violence of You Were Never Really Here (2017). Though different in narrative shape, Die My Love spiritually resembles films of psychological descent such as Repulsion (1965) or Possession (1981): https://kaygazpro.com/possession-1981-drama-horror/ – cinema where the true horror is not external, but internal. Mostly, though, it comes very close to Baby Ruby (2022): https://kaygazpro.com/baby-ruby-2022-drama-thriller/. Yet another film that must not be ignored.

This is not an easy watch. Nor should it be. Die My Love is a brutally honest depiction of postnatal depression, transforming moments culturally framed as “beautiful” into a waking nightmare – for the sufferer and for everyone orbiting them.