Die, My Love by Lynne Ramsay

Last updated on June 9, 2025

A film by Lynne Ramsay

With: Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Pattinson, LaKeith Stanfield, Sissy Spacek, Nick Nolte, Gabrielle Rose, Phillip Forest Lewitski, Sarah Lind, Victor Zinck, Jr., Debs Howard

A woman living in a remote rural area is driven to the brink of insanity by marriage and motherhood.

Our rate: ***

Die My Love by Lynne Ramsay, as we expected (and hoped), is very radical, but seems to have left much of the press unmoved. It must be said that the film ticks many of the boxes of what Cannes has too often shown: works by filmmakers who go all out for the Palme d’Or, even if it means alienating the audience—and the press—but captivating critics who see it as the ultimate gem, the diamond in the rough. Yes, Die My Love undoubtedly belongs to that category of hyper-pretentious films that will disgust viewers with its constant excess, not its insistence. But looking at it from a different angle, Lynne Ramsay, rather than aiming for the totally misunderstood masterpiece that she would refuse to explain, offers us more of a cocktail film, with a motif. An explosive cocktail of colors, sounds, radicalism, visual experimentation, constant photographic research, and, relatively new for her, she also tries her hand at shocking editing, with a very free editing style that departs from established habits. Die, My Love is obviously, irrevocably, imminently brutal, and of course we are dealing with a highly psychiatric theme. High and low. Form follows content. Everything contributes to the explosion, right down to the excessively battered body. Psychology creeps in with small touches, in rational moments, as does romance, which pops up unexpectedly when you least expect it, or not at all. The latter oscillates between a Mallickian ode and a Bonny and Clyde-style trip, or even Sailor and Lula, alternating between the two. And then Jennifer Lawrence is given a role that requires her to dig deep into her animal instincts, full of power and danger. We see all the talent she showed at a very young age in Winter’s Bone, which had somewhat disappeared under the Hollywood machine. Divisive, deconstructed, yet very theoretically thought out. You will probably hear people say that the film has little thread, that it goes in all directions, or that it doesn’t develop anything, but, in our opinion, its main flaw lies in the fact that Lynne Ramsay delivers a film that is too conceptual, too masterful, too controlled. The apparent formal abandonment is in fact locked into conceptual constraints that are too prevalent… But still… wow… Lynne Ramsay is trying!