REVIEW: Die My Love [2025]

Rating: R | Runtime: 118 minutes
Release Date: November 7th, 2025 (UK/USA)
Studio: MUBI
Director(s): Lynne Ramsay
Writer(s): Enda Walsh & Lynne Ramsay and Alice Birch / Ariana Harwicz (novel Die, My Love)

May we live long and die out.

Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) is less than thrilled with the state of the home Jackson (Robert Pattinson) has purchased. Are they leaving the city for the sticks? Maybe. We never really find out. Their story is therefore inextricably tied to this location in disrepair. A place from his past. A place that has seen death. A place with as much chance of being reclaimed by their love as it does destroying it. Because all roads do ultimately lead to tragedy. Uncle Frank’s suicide. Harry’s (Nick Nolte) dementia. Pam’s (Sissy Spacek) loneliness. Grace’s psychological prison.

Adapted from Ariana Harwicz’s Spanish-language novel, director Lynne Ramsay actually came to Die My Love last. Producer Martin Scorsese read the book first before passing it onto Lawrence with the thought that it would be a perfect vehicle for her to take on the lead role after another project they planned to collaborate on dissolved. She in turn passed it to Ramsay in hopes of bringing it to life before the filmmaker passed and suggested something else due to similar themes as We Need to Talk About Kevin. She eventually relented.

Ramsay then brought on playwright Enda Walsh to help with the script (with Alice Birch earning a credit as well), molding its postpartum drama in a way that centers the mother’s instability as a reaction to a world gone mad rather than from an omniscient place focusing on her own madness. That’s not to say Grace isn’t unravelling to the point of psychosis. It’s just that the catalyst for doing so is less about a rejection of the baby than it is a rejection of everyone telling her that her tumult is “normal.” Her response: “Then you won’t mind if I go to eleven.”

Yes, she’s struggling with motherhood insofar as the added responsibility that doesn’t seem to be getting shared by Jackson. But she loves her child and always puts him first. But she’s justifiably tired. Lonely. Restless. Bored. And instead of meeting her at her most playfully weird to break the monotony, Jackson brings home a puppy. Another untrained life to care for while he’s away. So, Grace tries to escape by visiting his mother nearby only to find Pam losing her own sense of self with Harry gone. Her comforting “everything will be fine” loses credulity.

Many minutes go by where Grace (and the audience) can’t outrun the barking and whining of that dog. If she weren’t already loosening her grip on reality, the incessant noise would surely do it anyway. Her temper grows shorter. Her patience with Jackson dissolves. And her actions turn from sarcastic frustration to chaotic exhibitionism. It’s not therefore a mistake that Ramsay calls the finished product a dark comedy. It very much is exactly that due to the lengths Grace goes to silence the platitudes of the dull automatons surrounding her.

And it only gets funnier once you add in Jackson’s perpetual pendulum swings between incredulity and panic. He thinks he can match Grace’s energy as a means of tiring her out or finding common ground, but he’s unprepared for just how done with the charade of civility and self-preservation she’s become. So, every time he pushes her to the edge, he falls to pieces trying to bring her back to sanity. Regardless of whether he’s cheating on her or she merely thinks it, he truly does love her and believes it’s enough to save them.

We know it’s not, though. Ramsay doesn’t cut from their arrival at that house to a forest burning in flames because she thinks it’s a cool segue. No, she’s preparing us for the incendiary and often violent events upon the horizon. She’s visualizing the guttural scream that Die My Love represents. The inevitable reality that love, children, family, and shelter aren’t answers to a person’s pain. They are merely distractions. They’re Band-aids able to quell the fire just long enough for some idiot to remind them it’s all a socially manufactured façade.

I love the implications of this. Ramsay and company using the flawed safety of a heteronormative blueprint of happiness as the uncanny Stepford valley to be shattered rather than an archaic, 50s-sitcom conservative filter because patriarchy doesn’t see a difference. And I love that the film positions Grace as the model of sanity rather than the person who needs fixing. Because parenthood is crazy and sacrificing your identity for love isn’t tenable. We should all be jumping through sliding glass windows and stripping to swim in the pool at a child’s party.

Lawrence owns the screen while giving life to the impulses we’re told to ignore. Even just to tell off a cashier trying to get through her own mundane day. Her aptly named Grace has had enough of the word. She’s had enough of the constraints attached to the results of her willingness to give into patterns we’re conditioned to believe pave a road towards happiness. Because if returning to this life means becoming one of these obsequious, small talk-loving robots, is it actually worth the compromise? Enough is enough.

Pattinson is very good as well. His Jackson is pushed to reject Grace via the embarrassment she foists upon him, but he also cannot fathom living without her. He tries until things start to go back to “normal” so he can forget again and return to his own patterns of being a martyr. Because he’s stuck too—in the opposite way. He’s stuck in her hurricane when all he wants is to be one of those robots. To live quietly alongside Grace like his parents. To trust implicitly and lose his own memory so he’ll never have to remember the pain of future loss.

The title is thus less about the characters than their bond. It’s imploring them to set fire to what it is that connects them so they can pursue their desires without the other holding them back. Everything we see therefore centers the destructive nature of Grace’s actions rather than her place within them. What will be the final straw? What will finally allow him to let her go? And Ramsay edits it together like a Terrence Malick film with poetic vignettes that feel culled from a much greater wealth of footage (see LaKeith Stanfield).

What will surely detract some audiences, however, is her decision to provide an early flashback showing Harry after we know he’s passed. By doing so, it’s easy to find yourself uncertain of time and place—if not reality itself. Is Grace and Jackson’s wedding a flashback or were they never married to begin with? Do they go to the beach after a mental facility stint or is it a manifestation of her PTSD? What else is fantasy? It honestly doesn’t matter, though, since the motive and result are the same. No matter how much she loves him, this can’t be her life.