Die My Love has been one of my most anticipated films of the year. While it may not connect with some audience members, the more I’ve thought about it, the more I appreciate what director Lynne Ramsay is doing. While I’m glad that Die My Love is doing well at the box office, audience reactions reveal a concerning trend in viewer engagement with challenging films.
Die My Love follows Jennifer Lawrence’s Grace in the months after the birth of her first child. Paired with a move to rural Montana and the lack of interest her husband, Jackson (Robert Pattinson), shows in her, Grace begins to struggle with postpartum depression and psychosis. Die My Love forces its audience into Grace’s mental state as she begins to lose her grasp on reality and her own identity. Like many of Lynne Ramsay’s other films, it’s simultaneously hard to watch and impossible to look away as tensions build between Grace and Jackson.
Die My Love is based on a novel of the same name by Ariana Harwicz. There’s a distinctly literary feel to this that, despite the beautiful cinematography and the experimental techniques Ramsay employs to put the viewers in Grace’s mind, holds the film back. Die My Love is an incredibly insular film that, without the inner monologue of prose, might keep viewers isolated. While I often related to Grace and sympathized deeply with her, I’ve heard other viewers complain that they formed no connection to her. The film rides on Grace’s character and Jennifer Lawrence’s performance and requires a level of empathy from the audience in order to succeed.
Luckily, Jennifer Lawrence’s performance may very well be the best of her career. While viewers may not always understand why Grace behaves the way she does, Lawrence makes her feel like a fully-fledged person. Flashes of moments before their child’s birth reveal more and more of Grace’s personality, making it all the more distressing when she begins to lose her sense of self. Jackson’s ambivalence, her isolation and the pressures of motherhood all begin to pile up, making it impossible for Grace to find herself.
While Die My Love has been extremely successful with critics, I was shocked to see a 44 percent audience score on Rotten Tomatoes and a D+ Cinemascore. Of course, audiences hoping to see a romance play out between Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson (perhaps because of the marketing playing on the audience’s love for The Hunger Games and Twilight franchises) might be disappointed and even confused by a film like Die My Love. But I think that this disconnect with general audiences speaks to a greater problem in moviegoing. Throughout my screening, I heard a group beside me repeatedly whisper “she’s crazy!” to each other. A post online relayed hearing someone in their audience say that Grace “was just crazy and needed to be locked up.” The common thread between these reactions is a lack of empathy and an unwillingness to engage beyond the surface with the media we consume. It’s easier to laugh at the moments that shock us and brush off a character’s behavior as “crazy” than it is to think more deeply about why someone might behave the way they do. Movies are supposed to put us into other people’s shoes and let us empathize with characters far removed from our own experiences. If we’re unwilling to sit in the discomfort we feel, to think deeper about a movie’s themes, what is the point?
Die My Love won’t be for everyone, but I believe that anyone can find a piece of themselves, or someone they love, in Grace. Her depression is an abyss that sucks each part of her into nothingness, leaving the audience to watch as she fights desperately to remain whole. Grace’s postpartum depression does not manifest through her relationship with her son, but rather through her relationship to herself. Summarizing such a visceral battle for selfhood as “craziness” feels incredibly dismissive of what Lynne Ramsay is trying to say about motherhood. I hope that as films like this — experimental and challenging to watch as they may be — reach wider audiences, viewers will start to understand the importance of engaging with the films they watch.
Nicholas York is a junior in the School of Arts and Sciences. He can be reached at nay22@cornell.edu.
‘Projections’ is a column focused on reviewing recent film releases.
