‘Die My Love’ – what went wrong?
There was perhaps no film at the Cannes Film Festival with as much buzz as Die, My Love, with Lynne Ramsay emerging from an eight-year-long hiatus after the release of You Were Never Really Here. Since then, many projects have been attached to Ramsay’s name, with most of them crumbling due to a lack of funding and leaving fans of her work waiting in the lurch for another stroke of genius.
Ever since the opening scene of Ratcatcher, in which a boy slowly spins with his head trapped beneath lace curtains, Ramsay showcased a distinct cinematic palette that had never been seen before, often depicting violent and unsettling situations with restraint and subtlety, leading to an otherworldly feeling as we melt into the inner world of characters who live on the fringes of society, whether it be a young boy living on a council state or a traumatised veteran.
Naturally, the hype around Die, My Love reached a fever pitch when it was announced that Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson would star in the film, with Ramsay finally working on a tangible project that felt closer than ever to being realised. But after attending the premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, I left with a distinct sinking feeling that it wasn’t the film it was supposed to be, and wondering what exactly went wrong.
Die, My Love follows a woman called Grace who is struggling with post-partum psychosis and the changes within her relationship while living in the middle of nowhere. Lawrence is truly exceptional in the role, with the actor unleashing this sense of primal madness as Grace grapples with a sudden identity crisis that is prompted by motherhood, unable to reconnect with her creative identity, who she is as a mother, her sexual identity or shift in her marriage to Jackson. However, the film falters in that it cannot keep up or match the stakes and complexity of Lawrence’s performance, leading what should be an explosive and feral story to become messy, rushed and slightly predictable.
While there are flashes of brilliance towards the beginning of the film, with a manic montage as we see Grace and Jackson during the honeymoon era of their relationship, which is then contrasted with the pent-up frustration they both feel in this new phase of marriage and parenthood, the formula of the film quickly becomes apparent as the story cuts between a moment as Grace does something crazy and sticking her tongue out at benign objects, followed by Jackson’s reaction. Rinse and repeat for the entire movie.
The editing is confused and all over the place, with moments in which the editor is clearly trying to create ambiguous moments in which the audience will glean their own meaning from it, but sadly, it comes across as a scrambled mess in which they have no clue what they are trying to say. In places, it feels like a jumbled pile of random images that they’re adding in and hoping for the best, with no subtlety to help us find nuance from the complexity of the character, something that is further hindered by the weak writing that doesn’t allow for any deeper commentary to shine through on the themes it concerns itself with.
The film ends with a fizzle instead of a bang. While it is clear what they were going for, with the burning forest representing a new equilibrium and symbol of rebirth for the couple, it doesn’t have the profound effect they were aiming for, with some out-of-place music and strange special effects added to the end sequence to trick you into thinking something very emotional is happening, even though I didn’t feel a thing. During the press conference for the film, Ramsay described how her way into the film came from looking at it as a love story, something that didn’t feel apparent to me at all until that final sequence, even though it was executed poorly. If this was the intention all the way along, then I think the film would have benefited from being more stripped back and simplistic in order to allow the complexities of their relationship to truly unfold, something that felt like more of a side story compared to Grace’s experiences with mental illness.
While I truly wanted to love the film, I left feeling disappointed by an overarching feeling of incompleteness. It feels as though a great film is hidden in there somewhere, but it just hasn’t been post-production timeline, with the project being announced and then denounced from the Cannes lineup before finally being added last minute. Who knows what happened behind the scenes, but it feels as though the project was rushed and if it had been given a bit more time to breathe, Ramsay’s true genius would have flourished.
