Die My Love (2025, Lynne Ramsay)

67/100

Fun fact: I had no idea who Die My Love’s stars were (prefer to see major films like Cannes Competition titles tabula rasa whenever possible), and Ramsay shoots the first few minutes in such a way—either at a distance or with faces obscured—that I still had no idea for a while, even though Lawrence and/or Pattinson are onscreen the entire time. (Couldn't place either's voice.) Both the filmmaking and J-Law are explosive, exhibiting a restlessness that keeps abruptly shattering physical objects and/or the movie's rhythm—I assumed Rose Byrne had this year's Most Intense Performance locked up, but calling Grace feral would be simply descriptive, as Lawrence spends much of the film crawling around on all fours. (I mean, it's two or three times occupying maybe a minute of screen time total. But that's a lot, impression-wise!) This is one of those movie-as-perpetual-traffic-accident deals that you can't look away from or relax during, made more jarring by Ramsay's penchant for disorientation; the film repeatedly leaps around in time with zero signposting, and major events occur offscreen minus any effort at exposition. I do think Ramsay pushes that a bit too far when it comes to Lakeith Stanfield's character, even as I thoroughly enjoyed not knowing what the mighty fuck was going on there for quite some time. ("Cut your lip" really needed some kind of context, more than we get.) My other reservations mostly involve a general feeling of familiarity—Die My Love sometimes feels a lot like mother! (Lawrence gradually losing her shit while sequestered with her husband[-to-be] in a remote house), often formally recalls Morvern Callar (in its expressionistic portrait of a woman's valiant effort to cope with inexpressible emotion); I love one of those films and quite like the other, so could be worse—and the movie sorta waffling about whether it's specifically about postpartum depression. Thought the wedding sequence was a flashback explicitly meant to rule that interpretation out, which was exciting, but I was mistaken. Also, Ramsay continues to be much better at creating chaos than at resolving it in a totally satisfying way, though it's possible that this ending came straight from the source novel. Fun fact #2, for those who don't regularly sit through a film's closing credits: That's Ramsay herself singing "Love Will Tear Us Apart" a cappella in a doomy Faithfull-ish gutter voice through nearly the entire scroll. For someone who's made four consecutive literary adaptations, she's pretty damn personally invested in her work, seems like.