Cannes Diary 05: "Die My Love" - A Tale of Two Comebacks

by Elisa Giudici

Die My Love was poised to mark two significant female comebacks, both artists seeking a powerful resurgence. One fully succeeded; the other, decidedly, did not, though pinpointing exactly what went wrong with the latter isn't straightforward.

Let's start with the winning bet: Jennifer Lawrence. After Causeway and No Hard Feelings (films that showcased good performances but had limited media impact), Lawrence has made a comeback worthy of her marquee name. Her performance here is a strong contender for festival awards and, looking ahead, could go far, especially since MUBI has acquired the film for international distribution...

As Grace, an aspiring writer who leaves New York with her husband to live in his deceased uncle's isolated woodland home, Lawrence grapples with severe postpartum depression. She delivers one of the most emotionally raw performances of her career, certainly among her best. It's a display of great maturity; she isn't concerned with appearing beautiful or composed. Instead, she lets a powerful, aggressive physicality, a messy realness, and, above all, a gaze flickering with madness, paranoia, and solitude do the work. It's a physical, gritty, fully committed performance. Lawrence masterfully handles complex scenes—like crawling on all fours through tall grass, knife in hand, mimicking a feline—and manages to overshadow everything else. Lawrence isn't afraid to be unpleasant, to make the audience uncomfortable, shying away from neither nudity nor explicit scenes, as she excavates the most destructive parts of an isolated woman. This, at times, unleashes a surprisingly dark and abrasive humor.

Alongside her, Pattinson brings humanity to a husband convinced he's supportive and genuinely in love, yet unable to see how bringing home his perpetually barking dog for her to care for while he's away for work, or refusing to turn off the radio at her request because "it's a classic," is like pushing her further into the abyss. Conversely, Grace often manages to pull herself out of her destructive spiral when her husband needs her. The tragedy isn't a lack of love between them, but their inability to be effectively supportive when she needs it most. Nick Nolte and Sissy Spacek offer further counterpoints to Lawrence's black hole. Particularly touching is the parallel drawn between a woman struggling to readjust to a reality with a new life to care for, and another (Spacek's character) unable to recalibrate her routine around the void left by her husband's death.

The comeback that leaves a bitter taste is Lynne Ramsay's, highly anticipated given that her last film, You Were Never Really Here, dates back to 2017. On paper, adapting Ariana Harwicz's novel should have been a perfect foundation for the director of We Need to Talk About Kevin. Ramsay weaves a thriller built on the latent violence surrounding Grace: the aforementioned knife, an altercation with the incessantly whining dog (Lawrence gets on all fours and barks back), stealing her mother-in-law's rifle, her resentment towards her husband, the fear that the baby will be the victim, and self-harm, all within a house overshadowed by the ominous precedent of a suicide. Indeed, the film opens with an exterior shot of the house, with Lawrence and Pattinson's off-screen voices discussing their new life there, before they enter and colonize the abandoned space with an animalistic coupling on the floor.

The temporal flow is immediately disrupted. The sound design—the future and current inhabitants (mice that have colonized the house), flies, the roar of a motorcycle belonging to Grace's future lover (is the affair real or in her head?), the hum of the power plant—is calibrated to besiege both protagonist and viewer with the unseen. This is often paired with nocturnal scenes in blue and yellow tones that feel apocalyptic, delusional, and maybe are. The use of music as a disturbing element, the frame compositions, it's all excellent craft. But, however fine these individual elements are, they fail to create an satisfying film.

This is partly due to Ramsay's radical choice not to explain, not to guide, not to even allow the viewer to sympathize with Grace, presenting her in all her unpleasantness, showing us why her relatives are so slow to understand. While the psychological horror atmosphere and American Gothic setting are palpable, Die My Love lacks the solidity of a complete story to inhabit this heavy mood. The viewing experience is terribly alienating and almost punitive. Despite a reasonable runtime, the film struggles to find an ending, trying and discarding at least six or seven, each less effective than the last.