Lawrence is Raw, Revelatory in Die My Love

3 ½ stars

Just as they have you sit through 30 minutes of commercials and trailers before the scheduled start of a movie, theaters showing Die My Love should allow for a half-hour of decompression time for the audience at the end of the film. They’re going to need it.

Directed by Lynne Ramsay (You Were Never Really Here), Die My Love “follows Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and her partner Jackson (Robert Pattinson), who have recently moved into an old house deep in the country. With ambitions to write The Great American Novel, Grace settles into her new environment, and the couple welcome a baby soon after. However, with Jackson frequently – and suspiciously – absent, and the pressures of domestic life starting to weigh on her, Grace begins to unravel, leaving a path of destruction in her wake.”

If that summation reads like a press release from the studio releasing the movie, Mubi, that’s because it is. Almost a week after watching Die My Love, I’m not sure I could do a better job because I’m not really sure what the movie is about. I could explain some of the events, and I could go on and on about my favorite and least favorite scenes, but I’m not ready to do a deep dive into the meaning behind it all. I’ve been thinking about the film just about every day since watching it, but it’s always left me with the feeling that I’m missing something —some vital emotional connection to the story—the key to understanding it all.

And that may be because I’m not a woman. Die My Love tells a very female-oriented story in a very powerful way. It doesn’t in any way set out to exclude me as a male viewer, just as it doesn’t take time out to mansplain what Grace is going through.

And I’m okay with that because it’s part of what makes Die My Love such a powerful experience. At a time when the vast majority of movies released to theaters, and more likely dumped onto some paid streaming service, are dumbed down to cinematic pabulum, it’s exciting to watch something so bold and challenging. And the heart and soul of that excitement, and of a lot of those challenges, is the high-wire performance of Jennifer Lawrence. It’s hard to think of many other actors who would even consider such a soul-baring role, let alone surrender to it so completely. Lawrence is so dominant that, in fact, the rest of the cast doesn’t stand a chance. At best, like Pattinson as her husband, they serve as a sounding board for her to bounce off. At worst, like the odd appearance of an ancient Nick Nolte as her befuddled father-in-law, they’re little more than distracting background noise.

And, perhaps to a lesser degree, I’m ok with that, too.