On paper, it seemed like a perfect marriage. Ariana Harwicz’s 2018 Man Booker International Prize winner, Die, My Love, spins on the feral urges of a new mother losing her mind after moving to the countryside with her partner. Who better – you might think – to cinematically immerse us in this spiralling state than Lynne Ramsay, the Scottish photographer-turned-filmmaker behind Ratcatcher (1999), Movern Callar (2002), We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) and You Were Never Really Here (2017), all hypnotic films that paint intense psychological states using images that feel ripped from dreams and nightmares. Add to the mix Jennifer Lawrence in her meatiest role since descending into hell in Mother! (2017) and surely this is a contender for the best film in the Cannes competition line-up. Alas, this adaptation lacks cohesion and ends up less than the sum of its parts.
Grace (Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson) relocate from New York to a remote rural location after Jackson’s uncle dies in violent circumstances, leaving behind his house. Soon she is pregnant. Shortly thereafter Grace’s beloved father-in-law, Harry (Nick Nolte) dies. This is relayed elliptically, as Ramsay cuts between timelines, crafting bombastic vignettes in which sound and fury bubble over: a forest fire, Grace and Jackson thrashing to music, Harry breaking a bottle.
Once the baby is born, Grace’s restless boredom turns primal while Jackson hits the road for long stretches. She is a writer who never writes (too accurate!) and kills time by listening to music, drinking beer, crawling around the house and playing with knives. A biker (LaKeith Stanfield) whose identity is concealed by his helmet shows his interest by driving regularly past. Even closer to home, mother-in-law Pam (Sissy Spacek) is going through a parallel madness as a result of grief. She sleeps with a gun in her arms and keeps her late husband’s new shoes on display.
A few choice sequences throb with the tension of Grace’s frustrated libido, but mostly the feverish character conveyed in Harwicz’s propulsive prose is not well served by the calmness of the composition. In a cramped 4:3 aspect ratio, one painterly image after another fills the screen. Even when Grace is trashing the house or injuring herself or otherwise running amok, she is boxed in by a frame that holds her neatly in its heart.
There is also the issue of Lawrence’s performance quickly exhausting itself. The difficulty of translating a book like this to the screen is its absence of an external narrative arc. Each of Ramsay’s previous films, save Ratcatcher, had source texts with knotty plots to scaffold her visions. Here, she brings out the big guns visually and in Lawrence’s performance too fast and Grace’s unhinged behaviour lacks the edge of surprise.
The book is a psychologically interior deep dive where it’s kept ambiguous when the narrator is imagining sex and violence and when she is engaging in it, a quality not present in this overly literalised telling. Lawrence gives a fully committed performance but often seems animated by childlike stroppiness rather than adult fervour. It’s only when Grace is shutting down social niceties with the actor’s well-practised deadpan that she disappears into the material.
MVP here is Robert Pattinson, whose layered performance contains both the man that Grace cannot abide and the one who is worried about his wife. His expression when she asks why he is stressed is so despairing that it deepens Jackson in one fell swoop. It’s a shame to single out a male performance in a tale of primal femininity. There is simply no one for Lawrence to bounce off and no structure against which to craft an emotional trajectory. She is dancing on her own.
Dir: Lynne Ramsay. Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Pattinson, LaKeith Stanfield, Sissy Spacek, Nick Nolte. Cert TBC, 118 mins
‘Die My Love’ is awaiting distribution
