Dec 15

Dec 15 Movie Review : Die My Love (2025)

Although the cultural discourse around mental health has (in theory) become more nuanced over the last twenty years, we somehow ended up in a world where sincerity feels riskier than oversharing. We’ve accidentally turned emotional collapse into a kind of performative hobby. It’s easier (safer even) to post a meme about losing your mind than to admit you’re actually worried about what your mind might do next.

Most people don’t want to hear “I can’t cope,” they want a relatable punchline they can screenshot. And instead of someone asking, “Are you okay?” you get a comment that amounts to, “Same, queen. Same,” which is basically the emotional equivalent of watching a forest fire from a hilltop and saying, “Wow, that’s wild,” while someone’s living room turns into charcoal six feet below you.

Because it’s one thing to lose your mind, but it’s another to do something about it. Self-destruction is not cool and it’s not some kind of inevitable aesthetic destiny, despite what films like Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love would like you to think. It’s gorgeous. Yes, it’s hypnotic. But beauty can be a form of lying, and this movie lies the way a slow-motion explosion lies: it makes devastation look transcendent.

Die My Love follows Jackson (Robert Pattinson) and Grace (Jennifer Lawrence), two young New Yorkers who relocate to Montana to inherit a dead uncle’s house and somehow build a life around it. It’s supposed to be a fresh start. Instead, the move lands like a cosmic prank. Grace, who clearly loves her newborn son but hates the circumstances he arrived into, spirals into a kind of existential allergic reaction to rural motherhood. Montana becomes less of a landscape and more of a mood disorder.

Jackson tries to help, in the tentative, useless way men often do in movies like this, but Grace treats every support system as if it’s one more trap disguised as kindness. She doesn’t want a better version of motherhood; she wants out of the concept entirely.

An Archeology of Suffering

What Lynne Ramsey is trying to do with Die My Love is a little artsy, fartsy, but not quite unrelatable. She’s going for a portrait of suffering you’re not supposed to logically understand but can somehow feel vibrating under your skin, like subwoofer-level misery. And on paper, that’s defensible. Aesthetically, even admirable. But here’s something you probably don’t know about me: I sideline as a mental health counselor, and nothing infuriates me faster than watching a film turn psychological collapse into something gorgeous, tragic, and conveniently relatable. It’s not mythic. It’s not poetic. It’s not a vibe.

It’s especially not supposed to be this sexy.

Long story short, psychological suffering can be broadly separated in two categories: a) one that has external causes (it’s never just one thing) and b) one that requires medication to fix. I’m not a doctor, so I won’t diagnose Grace, but Die My Love very consciously muddles the two. The film shows hints of both kinds of collapse yet seems aggressively uninterested in where any of it actually comes from. Yes, Grace is institutionalized at one point, and yes, that should function as an answer (or at least the beginning of one). But she dismisses it with a wave of existential boredom that no real person would use to dismiss their own well-being. And the movie lets her, because if she took the psychiatrist’s observations seriously, Ramsay wouldn’t get to stage her beautiful, symbolic finale in the woods. The narrative needs her to stay broken, because healing would ruin the aesthetic and I fucking hate that.

It would’ve made more sense if the film simply chose a lane. Grace refuses to engage with what she sees as her own personal non-history ( her parents died young, and she treats that fact like a blank page she refuses to read). Meanwhile, the people around her are flawed but genuinely trying. Jackson is an alcoholic, but he communicates, he looks for solutions, he actually shows up. His mother fumbles every emotional cue but still tries to be a stabilizing presence, even if she can’t imagine a woman wanting anything outside the sacred geometry of motherhood.

This could’ve been a story about inherited demons (hi, Ari Aster) or about an environment so isolating it becomes a psychological pressure cooker. But Die My Love never chooses, because choosing would collapse the metaphor. In the movie’s internal math, Grace’s suffering doesn’t need a source; it just needs to be aesthetically legible. What the film ultimately wants isn’t an explanation. What it wants is someone whispering, “same, queen. Same,” while the world burns behind them.

We Need To Talk About Grace

You don’t need to email me about it: I’m fully aware that my professional life makes me a uniquely terrible audience for Die My Love. But this disconnect shocked me, because I’ve been somewhat of a Lynne Ramsay fan for years, even when her films left me emotionally concussed.

This is the woman who adapted Lionel Shriver’s bone-chilling We Need to Talk About Kevin in 2011, a movie that treated psychological torment with a kind of reverent distance, like she didn’t want to pretend she had answers she couldn’t justify. It was clinical without being cold, empathetic without being sentimental. But in Die My Love, that careful distance mutates into something closer to prudishness, as if Ramsay still wants to film psychological suffering but doesn’t feel responsible for the implications of showing it. It’s like she’s saying, “I’ll capture the flame, but don’t ask me how the fire started.”

I’m sorry, but that doesn’t cut it anymore. Maybe it did in 2012, when We Need to Talk About Kevin confronted something so horrifying and inexplicable that ambiguity felt honest. But Grace isn’t a mystery, she’s someone the audience is clearly meant to identify with. She’s a constructed stand-in for every young parent quietly drowning under the weight of newborn chaos and social pressure. And that comes with a certain level of narrative responsibility.

I’m not saying Ramsay (or Harwicz, for that matter) owed Grace a cure or a tidy resolution. But they did owe her clarity: choices that reflect the real, often brutal calculus new parents face every day. Instead, her decisions only make sense aesthetically, like she’s a mood board in human form. The film’s message ( intentional or not) is that Grace isn’t real, she’s symbolic. She exists to romanticize her own pain. And, pardon my French, but that’s some bullshit.

Die My Love exists in that awkward half-space between looking good and actually being good. The cinematic uncanny valley where aesthetic bravado tries to masquerade as emotional truth. A character smashing her forehead into a mirror can look striking as hell, but if she does it at a moment when nothing concrete has actually collapsed, she’s not tragic; she’s just cosplaying an edgelord. Same with the “horny, symbolic stranger on a motorcycle” detour, it’s visually electric, sure, but if it contributes nothing to the story beyond “representation of turmoil,” then it’s not a metaphor. It’s a screensaver.

You might be completely divorced from my argument here and honestly, good for you if you are. But if you’re even remotely aligned with my wavelength, here’s the only practical advice I can offer: don’t pay money for this. Let it drift onto streaming, where its aesthetic ambition and narrative evasiveness can do less damage to your wallet.