‘Die My Love’ is a Hellish Image of Motherhood and Depression

If there’s one theme entangled throughout film in 2025, it’s motherhood. 

Whether in art films like “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” or “Hamnet” that directly reckon with the subject, or more mainstream films that weave in subplots about motherhood like “One Battle After Another” and “Sinners,” motherhood is clearly on filmmakers’ minds this year.

The latest film to enter into the 2025 motherhood canon is “Die My Love,” a manic, messy and unbridled portrait of a mother’s descent into a depressive postpartum nightmare. 

“Die My Love” is director Lynne Ramsay’s latest psychosexual female-led film. She brings with her two of the most popular modern stars in Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson. 

Lawrence (“Hunger Games,” “Silver Linings Playbook”) plays Grace, a mother to a newborn and wife to Jackson, portrayed by Pattinson (“Twilight,” “The Batman”). Within the film’s first few moments, viewers learn that the couple has moved to Jackson’s uncle’s house in Montana with plans to settle there. 

After this, the film is almost entirely plotless, consisting of visual metaphors and vignettes rather than actual narrative plot points. This choice is largely effective as the film is more set on creating an experience depicting postpartum isolation rather than providing a grand conclusion about the experience itself. 

The most essential element of this nauseating experience was the casting of Lawrence. 

Lawrence is absolutely on fire — alive and entrancing in every second she spends on screen. She accomplishes the incredibly difficult task of evoking empathy for a character whose actions are reprehensible.

She reaches within as a performer and unlocks a primal, animalistic performance that few, if any, other modern actresses could access. 

Lawrence’s physicality is outstanding throughout. She gets on all fours, grunts, snarls, collapses, and does whatever it takes to communicate the maddening isolation she’s experiencing. 

Ramsay (“We Need To Talk About Kevin,” “You Were Never Really Here”) locks the audience into Lawrence for almost the entire 119 minute runtime. 

We don’t escape her side, only descend with her into madness, where Grace’s premonitions of the past and her own personal demons converge into an inseparable stew. 

Grace’s experience isn’t to be analyzed but felt, which may frustrate some audience members looking for a more concrete and approachable story. 

Aside from Lawrence’s performance, Ramsay is able to depict the experience through a variety of other bold choices.

An easy-to-miss aspect of the experience is the sound design. The film opens with a black screen and the sound of waves followed by flies and crickets. The waves subside, but the crickets and flies do not, and for a majority of the film, there is a low undercurrent of buzzing that adds to the paranoia and primality of the film. 

The film is shot in 4:3 aspect ratio, making the screen more of a box than a rectangle. This choice adds to the claustrophobia of the film, also giving it what cinematographer Seamus McGarvey described to the French Association of Cinematographers as a “portrait-like quality.”

Stilted colors fill the frame, often over-saturated to create an unnatural brightness or tonality of color. This adds to the mixing of reality and the tormented image of the world Grace is experiencing. 

The center of Grace’s horrid psychosis is her doofus husband. 

Jackson can’t help but do more to hurt Grace than help her. Sometimes he’s not there, which seems awful for a mother who’s just given birth, and sometimes he brings home a puppy for Grace to care for — so whether an effort is being made or not, Jackson is complicit in the destruction of Grace’s life.

Pattinson, in far less screen time, is able to accomplish the same manic struggle Lawrence captures, creating tense but occasionally hilarious moments between the couple. 

Tonally, the film feels like an attack from the moment it begins and never lets up. Nature itself feels like it’s collapsing in certain moments of the film. 

People can try and write about this film, but it’s ultimately the sort of movie you have to see to believe. Just like motherhood and depression itself, the film is terrifying, saddening, intense, confusing, and most of all, inescapable.

“Die My Love” is in theaters as of Nov. 6.