Warning: This story contains spoilers for Die My Love.
If you’re wondering how the title Die My Love connects to a movie that has so far been branded by critics, a little reductively, as a “postpartum depression” drama, it’s because ultimately it all boils down to a doomed romance.
In the new darkly comic marital thriller from Lynne Ramsay (We Need to Talk About Kevin, You Were Never Really Here), aspiring novelist Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and her scruffy, country-born boyfriend Jackson (Robert Pattinson) swap New York City for the eerie, isolated wilds of Montana. Jackson has inherited a house from an uncle—who, we eventually learn, shot himself with a rifle—where the couple settles down to raise their first child. With the arrival of baby Harry and Jackson’s increasingly long absences from home, Grace’s life starts to come apart at the seams. The mother gradually descends into a mental health crisis from which no one can rescue her.
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The movie loosely takes its beats from Ariana Harwicz’s 2012 novel of the same name, “a surrealistic, dark fairy tale,” according to Ramsay. “It’s like, ‘Is this real? Is this not real?’ You’re kind of figuring it out.” Ramsay was liberal with the material, enlisting the help of writers Enda Walsh (Small Things Like These, Hunger) and Alice Birch (Normal People, Succession) on the script. The movie’s handling of themes of psychosis and motherhood kindled plenty of debate during its May premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, and its wide release into theaters on Nov. 7 is sure to reignite the conversation. Ramsay spoke to TIME to unpack its incendiary ending.
Read more: Jennifer Lawrence Gives Her Best Performance Yet in the Postpartum Fever Dream Die, My Love
An ominous beginning
When the couple first moves in, they are full of hope for their future together, chattering excitedly about their grand plans for Grace to pen the “great American novel,” or simply get a cat. But there is an ominous hint of what’s to come in this opening scene. Cinematographer Seamus McGarvey (who previously collaborated with Ramsay on We Need to Talk About Kevin) positions his camera inside the house, the low, static shot tracking their first steps into the ramshackle building. This results in a foreboding sequence, where we suspect from the jump that things might sour.
“When I saw the location, I thought it’d be really interesting to start in the interior of the house, this place that she feels quite trapped in,” Ramsay says. “It’s unconventional to start in an interior, like the house is looking at them, rather than the other way around.” The set-up became an accidental nod to The Shining, which is also about a couple—one of whom also has writers’ block—moving to a new home with a murky past. Ramsay adds: “It’s the sort of location like The Overlook where it feels like its own entity.”
All importantly, the treeline where Grace will finally meet her demise is visible through the patio window. It’s a shot Ramsay returns to at the film’s close, with Grace looking from the outside into what is meant to be her home.
In this moment, it becomes clear that Die My Love, rather than a bona fide postpartum depression story, is really an investigation into what it feels like to be at odds with the life you have built for yourself, to experience a rift between your internal landscape and the box you’ve put yourself in. “She sees herself from outside in a way, takes a look at her life, almost as if she was a stranger looking in,” Ramsay says.
Why does Grace and Jackson’s relationship fall apart?
That initial sense of dread doesn’t stop us getting caught up in Grace and Jackson’s frenzied, fiery romance. One of the earliest scenes shows the couple having passionate, animalistic sex, an overt reference to Malcolm McDowell and Christine Noonan’s sexually charged wrestling scene in the 1968 drama If. “He loves her, but he doesn’t get her,” Ramsay explains. “Maybe all the things that were really good in the relationship before— maybe the sex was great, maybe she’s a bit wild, maybe there’s been some mental health things in the past—those things are now becoming extreme and a bit alienating.”
Worsening Grace’s mental spiral, she discovers a pack of condoms in the glovebox of Jackson’s car, calling his his fidelity into question. Not to mention Grace’s own knife-edge liaisons with another new parent, Karl (LaKeith Stanfield), which she pursues to counter the numbing boredom of being stuck at home.
Jackson has been given the condoms by the mysterious, minor character Greg (Luke Camilleri), a childhood friend and a reminder that Jackson has returned to the community he grew up in, further reinforcing Grace’s status as an outsider. Though mentioned multiple times by Jackson, Greg only appears once. “You see him briefly at the party, if you look close enough,” says Ramsay. “But blink and you’ll miss him.”
Why does Grace disappear into the forest?
As in Harwicz’s novel, Die My Love concludes with a disastrous homecoming party. The circumstances, though, are more than a little uncomfortable: Grace comes back home after being committed to a mental health facility. Making one final attempt to fit the mold of perfect wife and mother, she bakes her own cake, with “welcome home” swirled across the top in blue icing. But the home she and Jackson had planned to cultivate together has been made-over in her absence. “When he’s done the house up, she’s been erased somewhat,” says Ramsay. “She doesn’t belong there anymore.” However, she insists, “there’s a real beauty in that he’s still trying, even though she’s going off into the wild.”
Cinema is no stranger to mothers pushed to the edge of sanity: in the last two years alone, we’ve had If I Had Legs I’d Kick You and Nightbitch. Ramsay cites two older films, A Woman Under the Influence (1974) and Repulsion (1965) as inspirations.Throughout Die My Love, the new mother pushes herself to ever-more violent extremes: hurling herself through, and thereby shattering, a window; or clawing at the walls. Despite being so visibly unhappy, it’s evident that Grace still loves her son. As she tells her psychiatrist, Harry is not the problem, “it’s everything else that’s f–cked”. Lawrence herself was over four months pregnant with her second child when she began filming, with Ramsay envisioning the role as “really feral.” “When you’re pregnant, you feel quite empowered in some ways. Lawrence just felt really raw [and had] this animalistic quality.”
In Jackson’s mother, Pam (Sissy Spacek), Grace finds a kindred spirit: a widow struggling with the recent death of her husband, who sleepwalks toting a gun. She first sounds the alarm about Grace’s behaviour and gives her permission to leave the excruciating party. “She just sees that this beast has to be free,” says Ramsay.
Where Ramsay departs from the book, though, is the climactic fire Grace sets ablaze in the nearby woods: the culmination of her anguish. “The end is quite metaphorical,” says Ramsay. “I mean, she burns her own book that she’s been writing. She burns work you’ve never seen. It’s like this woman burning her world down. At one point, I had her saving Rob from the forest and all ends well, but it just felt right in capping it there.” The forest is far enough away that baby Harry and everyone else at the party is safe. As Grace strides off into the fire—Jackson trying to stop her, but eventually letting her go, with a look of what seems to be relief on his face—we can only presume Grace perishes. “I wanted it to feel free, not dark, to have this kind of power in it.”
In this warped fable, everything comes back to the central couple’s twisted love. John Prine’s “In Spite of Ourselves,” Grace and Jackson’s anthem of sorts—sent to Ramsay by music supervisor Raife Burchell—sums it up: “Even though it’s got a country vibe, it’s quite a subversive song. I was like, oh God, it really has the vibe of what’s underneath this film—all the stuff that ain’t pretty under the relationship.”