‘Die My Love’ Review: Jennifer Lawrence is Grace Under Fire in the Best Performance of her Career [A] Cannes

From the opening frame of Lynne Ramsay’s fifth feature film, Die My Love, we see a house in shambles. A once promising place full of laughter and memories has been reduced to dust, leaves scattered on the floors, rats in various rooms, the paint chipping off the wall both inside and out; a complete overhaul. Yet, when Jackson (Robert Pattinson) shows his wife Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) their new home he inherited from his uncle, the outlook on the potential of the couple’s new home far exceeds the negatives of how much work this house would need to make it livable, not to mention how far and tucked away from everything it is in their small Montana town. ‘You could write the great American novel,” he gleefully exclaims to her as he is going room to room with excitement, even mentioning the idea that one of the rooms would be great to turn into a record studio for his band (though we never see Jackson play an instrument throughout the course of the film). While he sees joy, she sees his passion, the man that she fell in love with, to which Ramsay thrusts us from seeing them sitting on the floor of the house to ripping each other’s clothes off, to a shot of the woods outside and their house on fire. This rapidly edited selection of shots perfectly illustrates the tone and ride Ramsay is about to take us on, in one of the tensest depictions of a woman at her breaking point and her marriage falling apart that we’ve seen in a long time.

Told from the vantage point of Grace, we find her watching Jackson take care of their son on the porch of their house, crawling on the ground, like a lioness protective over her cub when sensing danger has arrived. Since having her child, she’s lost the ability to write, spending most of her days indoors, raising the baby, isolated from the outside world, with no friends or members of her family around. The only one that is close by is Jackson’s mother Pam (Sissy Spacek), who is willing to give Grace advice, but her style of parenting has led to the man-child that Grace is married to. In a flashback sequence, we see the young couple breaking the news to Pam, Jackson’s father Harry (Nick Nolte), and other members of the family, each of them willing to share their wisdom on what to do with a baby. Harry, who seems to have a connection with Grace, is also in his own prison as his mental state is on the decline. Yet Ramsay includes a short, tender moment between the father-in-law and daughter-in-law here, dancing in space, signaling that she will be carrying on his family legacy with the baby she is carrying, and perhaps fixing the mistakes he and Pam made as parents; a newborn baby brings hope with it. If you’ve ever grown up with a large family, you’ll know this scene all too well, as their advice can turn from being universal to rather specific about their own child, and ultimately becomes just noise you filter out. There is no book, no how-to guide to raising a kid, but rather trial by error until you find a rhythm that is your own. But for Grace, this “blessing,” this “miracle” becomes all that she cares about, consuming who she once was as the hopes and dreams of her youth start to fade away.

Ramsay’s not unfamiliar with a domestic drama centering on a woman on the verge of crumbling both on the inside and out, as her film We Need to Talk About Kevin explores the role of motherhood, the mistakes of having a child, as well as the destructive nature found within parenting someone the wrong way; or the idea of raising the spawn of the devil, if you want to be as literal about the evil faced in that film. But in Die My Love, the director, at the guidance of her lead actress/producer bringing her the idea from a conversation she had with director Martin Scorsese (also a producer on the project), gets a second bite at the apple at exploring more than just Grace’s role as a mother, but the main reason why Kevin doesn’t fully work, the rotten marriage found at the core of the story. As Jackson is making a living, on the road all of the time, we watch Grace suffer the mundanity found in being alone in a house all day, taking care of their child, listening to the same songs over and over again to keep her baby happy before he starts crying. Ramsay does make it clear that this man, who sold her the moon and stars, is now running away from his own responsibilities within his marriage, showcasing an on-going issue facing our world today where many individuals who parent children just aren’t ready for such a commitment. This also plays into the ineffective help of Pam as a grandmother, and the lack of support she has in the community around her. If Grace needs relief, help, or just a moment of peace, Pam, much like her son, isn’t there to assist her in shouldering some of the emotional burden off the young mother’s shoulders. When you marry a person, you aren’t just marrying them but you are also marrying their family and Grace, as well as the audience, comes to realize quickly that she’s part of a family with massive problems that stem from generational neglect and lack of care. In a rather short but effective role, Spacek shines as a matriarch of a broken family who doesn’t understand her role in the collapse of Grace’s psychological state.

With each new day and the more the mundanity of her life kicks in, Grace slowly loses her ability to rationalize the marriage and person that she has become, alongside the promise of her life, career, and independence taken away from her by someone who has no vision of their own. Many would think that this is a movie that’s sole purpose is to examine Grace through the lens of postpartum depression, and how she is losing her sense of reality as the events of the film play out. But Ramsay isn’t interested in that simplistic label for the condition Grace has found herself in, as the director, and her co-writers Enda Walsh and Alice Birch expand upon Ariana Harwicz’s novel and make it about the choices you make in life can lead you to you trapped in a puzzle box, leaving you wanting to crawl and scratch your way out of it in order to survive. When Jackson returns home, he buys Grace a dog, seemingly not reading the room as this would be another living thing that she will have to take care of, which makes her beyond frustrated. Everything at this point of their marriage feels like a Band-Aid on a wound that is gushing blood and past the point of saving, coming to a head with multiple sequences of rage between Lawrence and Pattinson. 

For Lawrence, an actress of her generation who found fame quickly with two Oscar nominations and a win, a global franchise, and massive superstar status, her role as Grace feels like a throwback to the actress that was in Winter’s Bone or mother!; an actress willing to hand herself over to her director and deliver a magnificent performance. Her work in Die My Love is easily the best of her career, as she uses her own personal experiences of becoming a mother over the last couple of years to add complexity to the anxiety, fear, and loneliness found within Grace’s story. A short but powerful moment in the film comes when she is on the phone with Jackson, and he is at a small diner eating a burger for his meal before he heads back out on the road. She asks him about it, and while a simple question, her delivery of it sums up how sad and desperate Grace is for any information or distraction from outside the walls of her house. When he doesn’t obliged in describing it to her, her sadness turns to rage, and that quick change in her demeanor is what makes Lawrence special as an actress, the ability to go from zero to sixty in a blink of an eye, thus giving Grace this unpredictability within every action she does for the later part of the film. Alongside Lawrence is one of the most reliable actors working today in Pattinson, whose charming good looks and wide smile are weaponized as a man who is beyond the point of maturing, a lost little boy. As Grace slowly unravels, flashes of the past come to her mind, even moments that might not even be real, like a romantic relationship turned obsession with another man (LaKeith Stanfield), or how she spent the night she got married alone in her hotel room drunk, talking to the front desk clerk. Just like the novel, the film is presented entirely through the perspective of Grace, and in watching her deteriorate, so goes our complete trust in anything that is going on within these visions or connections with other people outside her family bubble. In this lies the subtle brilliance in storytelling by Ramsay, as we try to piece back in our minds the exact moment Grace turned, and reality might’ve started becoming fiction. Was it before she runs through a glass door at their house, tries to jump out of a car, harms their dog, scratches the wall inside a bathroom, takes off her clothes and is the only adult swimming at a children’s birthday party. In many cases, it isn’t one single event, it’s the culmination of moments that turn someone into an unrecognizable version of themselves, and Lawrence reaching that breaking point is nothing short of miraculous, as it is both terrifying and heartbreaking to watch unfold.

Die My Love ranks as some of Ramsay’s best work yet, with confident direction from a visual, tonal master of their craft. Each scene breathes sadness, claustrophobia, and intrigue as we watch a family disintegrate into ash and dust. Ramsay, with the assistance of her cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, delivers a physiological feast for the eyes; one where visions, flashbacks, images, moments, seconds are splashed together to collectively showcase how poisonous a marriage can become over time, and once the genie is out of the bottle, there is no “starting new” as Jackson asks Grace towards the end of the film. All that is left are pieces of a once promising young woman.

Grade: A

This review is from the 2025 Cannes Film Festival where Die My Love premiered In Competition. MUBI will release the film theatrically in the U.S.