‘Die My Love’: The Domestic Politics of Sex, Gestural Cinema and Rock & Roll, Baby!
CANNES — If you, like me, have a soft spot for “character acting,” John Prine and a general partiality for films that make you itch just looking at them, Lynne Ramsay’s “Die My Love” might just emerge from Cannes as your perfect darling. Granted, in the world I live in, you can get away with anything if you make enough Nick Lowe references. God help the beast in me…
First, we need to talk about Lynne Ramsay! “Die My Love” is a far cry from the Scottish director’s first turn at Cannes, with “Ratcatcher” (1999), “We Need to Talk About Kevin” (2011) and “You Were Never Really Here” (2017) all premiering at the festival. Her work post-millennium has made a habit of screening in competition, and “Die My Love” may be her most compelling exploration to date.
The film follows Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson) in a desolate countryside of America as they settle into an old yet newly inherited home to be close to Jackson’s mother, Pam (Sissy Spacek), recently widowed. They’re punk-rock as shit and fuck all the time, so the two have a baby within the year, as the story often goes.
From there, their lives become incessant noise. Grace, as she fervently submits to motherhood, slips in and out of what we might broadly attribute to postpartum psychosis, as those around her insist that “everybody goes a little loopy the first year.” Jackson holds an unspecified job that keeps him on the road for long stretches of time, and whenever he does decide to show up, it usually culminates in some slurry of weaponized ineptitude, simmering resentment and a shared, frustrated sexuality; a ready-made theatre of domestic ruin.
While the source novel by Ariana Harwicz is set in the French countryside, Ramsay places the film in rural Montana. If all this talk of domestic ruin (or the deployment of Sissy Spacek) has yet to convince you: Ramsay’s “Die My Love” is an American Gothic, through and through.
To reduce this relocation to superficial flourish would be of fantastic disservice to the narrative. Tracing back to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the American Gothic is a genre that has long grappled with cultural unease surrounding domesticity and motherhood, but the critical emphasis on the film’s postpartum aspects strikes me as trite and secondary. “Die My Love” is about expression: the desire to communicate something, even if only communicability itself, and the frustration of expressive impotence within a national framework that mythologizes self-expression and the limitless promise of the American frontier.
Through a telescope, beneath a star-littered Montanan sky, Jackson opens the real narrative with musings on the limitless possibilities of parallel universes. “Am I boring you?” He looks down at Grace, who seems disinterested. “Not you, baby, the universe,” she replies. “Who gives a shit?”
I would be remiss in neglecting to write about the domestic politics between Grace and Jackson, and this early moment’s a telling summation of where it’s headed. There’s undeniable intensity between the two, but since the birth of their son their relationship seems caught in inertia, waiting for her eventual “bounce back” — a refrain she hears all too often. Having gone the year without writing, and with Jackson absent and sexually withdrawn, Grace harbors a palpable energy that simmers throughout the film as she tries to tear away from domestic apathy — and in true Gothic fashion, the house itself seems to swell with her restless potential.
This makes Lawrence’s performance intrinsically gestural. As glimpsed in the recent teaser trailer, Grace is depicted primally, most often through animalistic pantomime — on all fours, prowling tall grass, barking at the dog, licking windowpanes — all of which can be observed from the trailer alone. As her physicality ranges from playful to disturbing to downright self-mutilative, her expressive and sexual deprivation gives rise to the mediality of her own body — the gesture to convey being in language while existing on the outside of it.
The cinematic gesture, historically burdened by bourgeois anxieties and pathologized as hysteria or inextricable from psychology, was long repressed from existing as a medium in itself. This, to my understanding, persists in the dominant critical read of “Die My Love”: a woman on the fringe driven to feral abandon by postpartum depression, à-la “Nightbitch.” What is too often lost in the concentration on domesticity, however, is Grace’s identity as an artist. Can Lawrence’s frantic theatricality be recontextualized by Grace’s creative impasse, interpreting gesture not as symptomatic but as articulation of what she fails to express through language? I say yes!
Everything in this film is so damn loud, and Grace’s voiceless exertions make her surroundings feel all the more oppressive. How does everything around her express itself so reflexively? Her son wails incessantly, the dog she never wanted won’t shut up, the open country drones with cicadas — even Jackson is a punk-rock musician, a practicing one at that. In one scene, Grace snaps, “I hate guitars,” as she kills the car radio. Jackson doesn’t get it: “Who hates guitars?”
“Die My Love” posits noise and voice, particularly rock and roll, to be elusively seductive, self-expressive — emblematic of the new American dream, for all but Grace. From Pattinson’s diegetic performances to a soundtrack steeped in Lou Reed, David Bowie (a transcendental use of “Kooks”) and the Cocteau Twins, the film’s deliberate oversaturation of rock music presses against her narrative relentlessly: a lingering resonance of the national ethos to self-actualize.
There’s a late reprise of the skygazing scene that even in hindsight feels like the heart of all this. Jackson’s at the telescope again, but this time, Grace answers differently. “Are we together? Am I a rockstar? Do we fuck?” She poses these questions to Jackson, the other universe, anybody; each lands so pointedly it’s almost hard to take them in. For a moment, it all falls quiet.
“I said, do we fuck?”
They’re going to try to tell you this one is about postpartum blues, but this film really sings when you let it resist easy diagnosis. “Die My Love” is rapacious in its own curiosity, at once innately human and radically un-anthropocentric. Meet it where it’s at. It’s not infallible by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s an unflinching study of an intimacy under dissonance and a deafening plea to reclaim cinematic gesture from pathology; a convincing case for the body as medium in and of itself.
As the credits roll and the final needle drops, what might just be the film’s guiding question reverberates. It’s a song by Joy Division, and one that needs no introduction:
What do we do when love, and all it’s bred between us, tears us apart?
“Die My Love” premiered in competition at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. It is set for a domestic release through MUBI on November 7, 2025.