DIE MY LOVE movie poster | ©2025 Mubi

Rating: R
Stars: Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Pattinson, Sissy Spacek, Nick Nolte, LaKeith Stanfield
Writers: Enda Walsh & Lynne Ramsay and Alice Birch, based on the novel by Ariana Harwicz
Director: Lynne Ramsay
Distributor: Mubi
Release Date: November 7, 2025

Despite what is implied in the advertising, DIE MY LOVE is not a thriller in any common usage of that word. Instead, it is a drama about postpartum depression that spirals into psychosis.

At the beginning of DIE MY LOVE, Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson) share a sexual desire that burns as hot as the forest fire intercut with their lovemaking.

We meet Grace and Jackson as they are moving into the large, isolated house in Montana (played here by Canada) that he has inherited from his late uncle. It is apparently (we never get a clear sense of local geography) a long walk down a dirt road from there to the home of Jackson’s parents, Pam (Sissy Spacek), who has taken to sleepwalking with a rifle, and Harry (Nick Nolte), who is suffering from dementia. So, there are plenty of mental health issues in the family even before Grace unravels.

We first see Grace and Jackson’s new home’s interior shot through a series of squared arches of rooms with identical wallpaper, suggesting the concept of infinite regression – i.e., someone looking at an image of themselves looking at an image of themselves and on into infinity.

This may or may not be part of what starts to go on in Grace’s mind as she gradually disintegrates. She loves her baby son but resents Jackson’s absences – he’s away a lot for work, though again we don’t know exactly what he does – lack of help with household chores, and general inability to be supportive.

So, Grace begins self-harming, destroying objects and whole rooms. Jackson decides to bring home a small dog. The dog barks and whines all the time, mainly because nobody interacts with him. (Does the reviewer really need to go into general sentiments about movies that treat harm to animals as a form of especially distressing property damage?)

Grace’s behavior is generally credible and Lawrence throws herself into the role with absolute commitment. She manages the trickiness of suggesting hectic energy, even when Grace is sometimes silent and unmoving.

Director Lynne Ramsay and cinematographer Seamus McGarvey make DIE MY LOVE almost lyrically beautiful, with stunning shots of landscapes and rapturous closeups of Lawrence’s expressive face.

Pattinson is decent as Jackson, though we can tell the actor is smarter than his character. Jackson comes off as a well-meaning but clueless Schmoe who can’t figure out what he ought to be doing, and who has fully bought into old notions of what domestic bliss ought to be like (maybe circa 1950).

Spacek and Nolte are both excellent and LaKeith Stanfield plays a man who may be real, imagined, or both with the appropriate fluidity.

But we are at an informational disadvantage. The screenplay by Enda Walsh & director Ramsay and Alice Birch, based on the novel by Ariana Harwicz, doesn’t tell us what sort of life Grace had before this. Did she have friends, was she in the city, how much of a change is this for her, with or without the baby?

These all have bearing on what’s happening in DIE MY LOVE, but we never find out any of it. We can’t even tell if Grace is bored because she is too depressed to focus on anyone or anything to the point where it’s impossible for her to connect, or if she’s depressed because she’s understandably bored with no goals and no meaningful communication with Jackson or anyone else. The filmmakers should be congratulated for getting the proceedings to have some momentum, as too often depicting boredom can lead to this in the audience.

There’s a lot going on in DIE MY LOVE, and it looks great, so it’s eventful and handsome. But although we feel bad for Grace, we’re never allowed to empathize with her. This isn’t so much a universal “there but for the grace of God, partner support, community, education, serotonin, etc. go I” as why some people are just too self-absorbed to help themselves. By the end, we’re more irritated than saddened, and that wouldn’t seem to be the intended result.

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