Just die already, let's get this over with
dir: Lynne Ramsay
2025
This flick could not be more different from the other two I watched and reviewed recently, even though it is about the same themes, regarding motherhood, regarding alienation, regarding the world that destroys young mothers and leaves them helpless once they actually have that first baby.
After watching three films in a row about this very issue, I have to say, I am now certain I don’t want to have any more babies. If was on the fence before, I’m pretty sure it’s the worst possible thing any woman can do for herself.
Of course, I am already a parent, and more importantly, I am not a woman, so I cannot ever be a mother or that particular victim of the patriarchy that suffers most. That brings me some relief, but it doesn’t make me feel any better for the squillions of women who go through these experiences, or much worse.
It comes as a major surprise to me that, of the three, Die, My Love is the worst, the absolutely worst rendering of what happens to a woman who becomes a first time mother in a rural Montana area, whose art (writing, she’s a writer, don’t you know) needs to be cast aside as she deals with the all-consuming reality of being a mum.
Except…
What stands out about this telling is that she, the mum, played by Jennifer Lawrence, doesn’t seem that fazed, under pressure, or overwhelmed. People keep assuming she has post-partum depression or anxiety, keep offering support, and she’s like “nah, that’s not what’s happening”. She doesn’t seem to dislike the baby boy, or hanging out with him, doing dumb stuff with him, or dislike the pressures of being a mum at all. She’s just bored.
She doesn’t seem to like being in Montana, Big Sky Country, that much. Previously from New York City, she doesn’t really see any point ingratiating herself with her husband’s family or friends, and resents small talk with locals, or with anyone, really. She especially hates being asked about her writing, like most writers.
So what happens for the rest of the movie? She acts out, perpetually doing weird, dumb or dangerous shit.
Why? Well, there’s the rub.
This is the kind of performance that film critics fall over themselves to fawn over. Oh, she’s so brave, she’s so fearless. Oh, wow, she just did another dumb thing half-naked, oh, she’s masturbating again, so brave, so fearless.
I found this flick, almost from beginning to end, to be pretentious twaddle. I found Lawrence’s performance painful at some points and laugh out loud unintentionally funny at others. I know she’s a great actor, you don’t have to remind me. Specifically, I’ve seen her portray characters struggling with mental illness and / or trauma, and she’s managed to do it in compelling and engaging ways. She can convey the interiority of the characters, the tension with their internal struggles, their difficulties in connecting with other people, effortlessly. Films as different as Causeway, where she played a wounded vet with depression, or Silver Linings Playbook where she played an insecure sex addict or Winter’s Bone, where she played someone suffering from poverty, she can do it all, genuinely, meaningfully.
She’s even good in big budget stuff like the X-Men movies, or even more so, the Hunger Games franchise as reluctant hero Katniss Everdeen. So why is she so appalling in this role?
It’s not like she didn’t study up on the role. She’s a two time mother herself, though I doubt her experiences were very similar in her case when it happened off camera. There’s an aspect of this that comes from actors and directors thinking that spontaneous actions or behaviours on screen can feel more “real” to audiences, more authentic.
I say, that is bullshit. Jim Carrey often did / does spontaneous dumb crap on camera, and that doesn’t come across as or channel authenticity: it just reminds us of how difficult it must be to work with him on set.
Lawrence does a lot of random bullshit here, and I’m not sure it accumulates into an actual character, or constitute even semi-decent character work. It’s not clear to me that it’s even about “maternal rage” or dissatisfaction with subsuming yourself into the role of a mother 24/7, when your mostly supportive husband is away for work all the time, and won’t have sex with you.
It’s kind of weird and facile that, I get it, her character is very horny a lot of the time, and her shitty husband seems to be fucking around a lot, anyone but her, and she fantasises about or actually does have sex with some guy in red leather on a motorbike who lives nearby (LaKeith Stanfield, who I don’t think gets a single line of dialogue).
But what does it mean? Nothing. Her descent into psychotic, self-destructive behaviour doesn’t feel real to her, and it didn’t feel real to me. It seemed independent of becoming a mum, or the pressures of being a mum, or of moving from the city to the country. It was just, it felt like “Okay just do some crazy shit now.”
It didn’t feel earned or organic, or even feel that necessary. It’s an acting showcase, so to speak, but it felt empty, to me. As a depiction of someone struggling with mental illness, I didn’t find if very credible or very believable, because she doesn’t seem to be struggling with anything other than bad acting choices.
Robert Pattinson as her husband Jackson is obviously outmatched in the acting stakes, because he’s Robert Pattinson, but other than trying to approximate what a sad person would look like when he realises his wife is completely bonkers and will kill them all if she gets the chance, he’s not much good either. I have seen him be okay in other things, and this does not approach okay. He’s neither interesting nor sympathetic.
Oh wait, she just went nude again, how brave.
The ending might have resonated with people, in that it’s pretty catastrophic, but I am not one of them. I found the whole production, the whole endeavour, to be lacking in meaning, insight, believability, tension or energy. It’s a mannered, arch, pretentious delivery of an ungainly message, which is that some people are just so complicated, huh? Oops, she’s nude again, how fearless! Give her all the awards!
Of the many terrible things they do in this flick, perhaps the one that offended me the most was the use of the song by Iris DeMent and John Prine In Spite of Ourselves, multiple times. They don’t deserve that song. That disgusted me more even that the scene where she’s licking a fucking windowpane, for no reason, good or otherwise.
If she gets nominated for this role, it would be an absolute travesty. Ironically, only for me, there are a number of crossover elements with the other two flicks I’ve been going on about (If I Had Legs I’d Kick You and Nightbitch), and I don’t mean thematically. As in Nightbitch, the main character spends a lot of time on all fours, pretending to be a lion or a wolf. It’s even more awkward than it sounds. Both films have the main character murdering their pets, in this flick it’s an annoying dog that won’t stop barking, but Nightbitch has the central mommy murdering their cat. Both If IHad Legs and Die, My Love have sole Black male characters in a tangential support role to an affluent white woman driven bonkers by maternity (in the earlier flick, it’s the genial James role played by A$AP Rocky).
Out of the three of them I was absolutely sure that Nightbitch would be the most superficial of the bunch, but this flick, even though it’s directed by Lynne Ramsay, doesn’t work at all for me. And this is the greatest irony about it: Lynne Ramsay has already made a tremendous, scouring, devastating film about maternal ambivalence; it was called We Need to Talk About Kevin. In that terrifying film, a mother, who never really wanted to become a mother, wonders what she did or didn’t do which caused her son to become a mass murdering psychopath.
I vowed that I wouldn’t watch that flick ever again, but I’d watch it a thousand times before I ever watch this bullshit Die, My Love ever again.
4 times oh wait now we’re mixing breast milk and ink again, how brave, how fearless, out of 10
--
“I heard you were a writer.”
- “I don’t do that anymore.” – probably a good thing - Die My Love
- 202 reads