There comes a tale from an antique land. A King ruled over a thin Isthmus, above and below which were two unfathomably large continents. A boat launched in the West Sea could not make port in the East, nor could a boat launched in the East Sea make port in the West, unless it went around the whole curve of the world. No man had ever made such a journey. A day came and with it two foreign Sailors, who paid homage to the King. They told him they had a vessel so fast and so nimble that it could leave from the West, overtake the sinking sun, and arrive in the East by dawn. The King marvelled at this promise. He would pay these Sailors with many gold doubloons if they could make him the first King of the Isthmus to depart from the East and arrive in the West. They told the King that if he came down to their ship that very evening, they could make the journey, though he must come alone. Each Sailor offered up his own son to the Royal Court, to keep them to their word. The King, giddy in his excitement, all but agreed. Suddenly, from the shadow of the throne, emerged the King’s Wily Vizier. He praised the King for his wisdom and his ambition, but pleaded that he accompany the monarch on the voyage. The Sailors began to protest. But the Wily Vizier said he would make it worth their while. If the ship that sailed West landed East, the Wily Vizier would commit his whole estate to the Sailors’ reward. The Wily Vizier spoke of an old legend that promised a fleet of ships to any who fell into the dream in the Western port and woke from it in the Eastern port. This would more than make up for his investment. The Sailors’ quietly conferred before accepting the additional passenger. Their sons were given into the custody of the Court, and the King made his way to the Western port, and the wily Vizier soon afterward with a small chest. A grand ship of sail awaited them, and they were met with a feast in the captain’s cabin. “Eat well and drink heartily, for the speed of the voyage will send you into a stupor!” said the Sailors. The King grew nervous about sleeping among these strange men, but the Wily Vizier calmed his nerves. For luck, said the Vizier, I will mark the underside of this table with a charm. The King believed in such superstitions, but he decided the Sailors better not know that they were meddling with the vessel’s furniture. He sent them to the deck to begin the voyage, and soon, just as promised, the King and his Vizier fell into a stupor.
The next morning the pair awoke, each comfortably ensconced in a cabin hammock. The light of dawn snuck in through frosted windows. The King, unthinking, lumbered up to the deck. With a crash and a yelp he sped back down the stairs. “My Wily Vizier,” said he, “we have done it! We have made port in the West!” The Wily Vizier, unfazed, said it was true, port had been made. The King frowned. Why was his Wily Vizier unimpressed by such a singular conquest of the roundling ocean? Perhaps he was mean in the handing over of his estate. The Sailors came down into the cabin and bowed deeply. They hoped the king was happy to have circled the globe. The King told them every doubloon in the kingdom would be theirs. They then looked to the Wily Vizier, and asked for the deeds to his estate. “Fear not, Sailors, your reward is in this chest,” said the Wily Vizier. The Sailors opened the chest and found it empty. “What is this treachery?” they said. The Wily Vizier said, “I promised you the deeds if the ship that sailed West landed East.” The Sailors protested and demanded justice from the King. In a fit of anger, or so it seemed, the Wily Vizier cast over the table. The King shouted against him in wroth. But the Wily Vizier said, “There is no mark on the underside of this table.” The King remembered the mark the Wily Vizier had made there the previous night. How could this be? At this moment, guardsmen sprung aboard, reporting to the Wily Vizier. We have found the ship, just as you said, hidden in the Far Bay. The King was astounded. “What is the meaning of all this?” he said. The Sailors panicked, but their escape was blocked. “You see,” said the Wily Vizier, “we may have awoken in the East, but we did not sail from the West. Yesternight’s feast was laced with a sleeping drug, and in our dozing we were carried — yes, carried! — under cover of dark from West to East. There a second ship, fitted identically to the first, sailed into the port, while the first was hidden in the Far Bay. I suspected this from the beginning, and made arrangements with the Royal Guard. But to be sure, I made the mark under the table, to see if it would appear the next morning.” The King was aghast, and ordered the Sailors be thrown in irons. As reward for his thinking, the Wily Vizier was granted both ships in perpetuity. “I fell into the dream in the Western port, and awoke in the Eastern port, and now the fleet has come to me,” said he.
The experience of Die, My Love is not dissimilar to the trick played by the sailors upon that Isthmian King. We begin with an image of a raging forest fire, and we end with an image of raging forest fire, and we must suppose that — between these images — we have made a journey across the full range of the profound. The sad detail of circumnavigation is that it takes the most convoluted route to arrive at the position started from. But equally, the fraudulent circumnavigation can achieve much the same conclusion without any of the legwork. If the conclusion is to arrive where one began, and if this image is itself associated with some kind of cyclic or recursive structure, then for the opening and closing to mirror one another in this way implies a significant enough gravity. We find ourselves tempted to fill in the gaps — to suppose that, in our sleep, we did indeed pass through a world unknown. But for those who remained entirely conscious for the duration of Die, My Love — a fate necessitated by several very loud noises interspersed throughout — the jig is up.
The film is premised by Lynne Ramsey as a “bonkers, crazy love story,” but this is another fragment of the deception. While the film may briefly tease the generic territory of a romance, it swiftly takes on the subject of the novel it is adapted from. This is, in very straightforward terms, a film about madness, and (in a lower register) a film about postpartum depression. As soon as the prologue concludes, we witness Jennifer Lawrence prowling her new yard, with a knife in her mouth and a hand down her trousers. This is how she will remain for the entirety of the film. We are to envision Die, My Love as an arthouse Nightbitch, albeit without that film’s basic structural commitments. Instead, we encounter the yo-yo immobility of a character whose madness is basic and implicit. She distrusts her lousy, ingrate boyfriend, who disappears to work a non-specific job. She fantasizes about a masked biker who rides slowly by her isolated home. She will find herself in any given social situation, and for a while act reasonably, and then lose patience with the world and do something embarrassing or irrational. The film does not build on any of these premises; rather, it cycles them about, one after the other, landing on a dramatic plateau. Perhaps the idea is to represent an unmoving, incurable, and non-responsive fallback. That Grace is caught in a feedback loop of anguish, against which the only possible catharsis is in violence or sex. The two — the knife and the hand down trousers — are twined up as one extremity. But that is itself the fault of the narrative: it is a single extremity strung out across a fundamental non-drama. We have sailed neither West nor East; we have tarried in the docklands all night.
Die, My Love’s most remarkable image is early. We see Grace standing above one of her notebooks blotched with inkspots. She dribbles droplets of breastmilk across the page, and we see as the cloudy liquid stains and mingles with the inky array. This image of the blotted, milky page then fades into one of the night sky, white stars piercing the black firmament. This image is itself revealed to be a reflection from the lens of a telescope, through which we see Jackson’s peering eye. The next cut shows Jackson peering at the stars instead of at his girlfriend; and it shows Grace unwilling to look at whatever it is Jackson has found. In this brief montage segment is a wealth of cinematic ideas. We begin with the most implicit: that the duty of motherhood in some way impinges upon or changes the duty of art. The two do not merge simply, but seem — in their substantial natures — to morph one another. The outcome of this combination is obscure and gloomy. But then we meet the stars: some cosmic importance, some infinity, is glazed across that previous image. The two ideas, creation and procreation, are in this sense a singular crosshatch. This tension of one fluid against another resonates outward; much in the way the film seems to contest its lonely woodland house with the woodland itself that surrounds it. The promise is made: that the course of the film will find the meeting between those two images.
But Ramsey complicates the procedure. It appears that we are not looking at the stars, but at a reflection of the stars. We are not looking up, but we are looking down (at a similar angle that we were looking at Grace’s manuscript). What is the implication of that? Could it be that Grace’s production is not the cosmos, but Grace herself? That her work is reflecting herself; that these mingling fluids contain within them some reflection of her starry reality? There is — it seems implicitly put — more in the human soul than the liquids extruded from the body. But there is, in thought and nature, some resemblance of the inner self. Ramsey then complicates the shot further. We see Jackson’s eye looking out. If Ramsey had intended a “bonkers, crazy love story,” then this image clambers in that direction. We have cut from Grace, to Grace’s fluids (black & white), to the stars, to a reflection of the stars, to Jackson peering up at them. He is distant, but in awe. There is something spectacular about this cosmic scene. The irony is cinched in the following cut, in which we find Jackson peering up to the Cosmic Grace and ignoring the hungry, bored Grace of the sublunar world. She is herself largely disinterested in matters cosmic. So we detect a fundamental tension: if Jackson is interested in Grace, it is not in the Grace as she now exists; and if Grace is interested in the world, she is no longer interested in that stratum of the world that exists beyond the physical. This is the meaning of the artistic subplot, in which we understand Grace as a writer who, since giving birth, has lost interest in writing. That is, at least, the idea.
But in practice, the artistic life of Grace is never developed beyond those early, milky droplets. In fact, the total lack of insight into Grace’s artistic mind suggests that the character was never really a writer; rather, she was someone who identified as a writer for a while, and just as swiftly gave it up. The detail is then a non sequitur; someone without a genuine creative outlet has given up a craft that she perhaps once dabbled with. If Ramsey’s intention was to portray the ways in which motherhood and depression eat into one’s creative self (and — as that great montage sequence implies — the cosmic reality), then this intention is blundered completely. Our only real knowledge of Grace is in fact superficial: she is a new mother with hypersexual and violent fixations. The scene toward the end of the film in which she burns her notebook may, in some other movie, have been affecting. In Die, My Love, it simply serves to remind us that she had a notebook in the first place. Jackson’s occasional barbs — “shouldn’t you be writing your novel?” – again, seem to indicate a pseudo-passion from a woman who doesn’t know what, if anything, she actually wants. Is the idea to reduce “woman” to the most primal, animalistic urges? Is the idea then to remain at that tenor for the entire length of the film? Ramsey is successful in bringing out this mood on a scene-by-scene basis. A sequence with a barking dog makes us all wish for the dog’s demise. Flies buzz ‘round and we, like Grace, forget whatever else is happening in the scene. Lawrence’s performance is like a gravity pool, very engaging and very present, but there is something absent in it. We cannot see the future in her face. Should Grace not be given some interior conflict? Where is the former Grace, the Grace we barely saw, in rebellion against herself? Should the film not allow this character some other mode of living? Instead, we are caught in a droning melancholy, in which not only is Grace reliably unhinged, but the world around her remains entirely static. Even in terms of decline, the film doesn’t much move. It finds a level and keeps to it.
The greatest irony is the point at which Grace’s personality is stable. She will defend her motherhood; she will never turn on her baby (save in one imagined scene of abandonment, a few seconds long); whatever madness infects her, her status as Mother is stalwart and infinite. This seems to be a concession in favor of Grace’s character. After all, she is not beyond redemption. And yet in making this concession, her character becomes even less defined; she is structured on the ultimate duty of a mother, in lieu of all other things. She will brutalize the world around her, but not her baby. There are some things inviolable; her madness is not to do with motherhood, but everything other than motherhood. This, we might think, is the reason Lynne Ramsey feels comfortable in saying this film that is clearly about postpartum depression, based on a book about postpartum depression, is in fact not about postpartum depression. But can we call it a love story? After an opening montage of a smiling, happy, coital couple, there is nothing but distance between Grace and Jackson. Whatever attempts are made to meet this gap feel half-hearted; Pattinson’s characterization of Jackson as a somewhat aloof, somewhat cartoonish burnout does little to endear us to him or to his relationship. Just in the way it seems as though Grace is someone who claimed to be a writer but never really was, it also seems like Grace is in a relationship that accidentally produced a child and has been trawling on vapours ever since.
We then meet the motivational void. If Grace hasn’t gone mad because of her postpartum depression, why is she mad? We might suppose the reasons include a false passion and an empty marriage, but then every image in the film (particularly in the latter stretch) seems to aggressively contradict this read of things. We are to suppose that Grace is an artist (but has lost the touch), and that Grace is in love (or is at least loved), and that her madness stems from her alienation from these things. This is not convincing. Grace has gone mad because Grace has gone mad. We must endure this madness for as long as the film continues. When it ends, it ends simply because it must end somewhere. There is no indication that the narrative, or any character, has made headway. The film ends where it starts because it never went anywhere at all. We have been hoisted overland by a pair of sailors.
DIRECTOR: Lynne Ramsay; CAST: Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Pattison, Sissy Spacek, LaKeith Stanfield, Nick Nolte; DISTRIBUTOR: MUBI; IN THEATERS: November 7; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 58 min.
Originally published as part of London Film Festival 2025 — Dispatch 3.
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