Die My Love Movie Review: Disturbing Elegance and Soundproofed with Hypnotic Intelligence | Cannes 2025

DavidMay 20, 2025Last Updated: May 20, 2025

0 9 minutes read

Die My Love it is noise, sweat, annoyance; to the 78th edition of the Cannes Film Festival the new film by Lynne Ramsay has arrived, the director who has already passed since the most prestigious festival in the world with… and now let’s talk about Kevin in 2011 e A Beautiful Day – You Were Never Really Here in 2017. This time, Ramsay confronts an extreme, lyrical, and ferocious text: the novel of the same name by Ariana Harwicz. A difficult work, all internal, visceral, and often ineffable. To bring it between the borders of the screen, the Scottish director relies on a very high profile cast: Jennifer Lawrence, sharper than ever, Robert Pattinson in the difficult role of the ghost husband, LaKeith Stanfield (Get Out, Judas and the Black Messiah) silent disturbing presence, and two giants of the seventh art as Sissy Spacek (Missing – Disappeared, Heart crimes) is Nick Nolte in the roles of his parents. The production is signed by Martin Scorsese, together with Andrea Calderwood and Lawrence herself (with her Excellent Cadaver). Filmed among the Canadian winters of 2024 and immortalized by analog photography of Seamus McGarvey, Die, My Love is an artisan work, dark, brutal, convulsive, but, above all, never seen before.

Die My Love Movie (Image Credit: Black Label Media)

Die My Love, we will talk especially about Jennifer Lawrence’s performance and deservedly. After taking a period away from the scenes to devote to herself and her family, the actress had already attempted to return with a couple of films, which, despite her excellent performances, went quite unnoticed: Causeway and No Hard Feelings. Die My Love is instead the perfect vehicle for a raise that goes far, maybe who knows, even in the Oscar area. Above all, it is a powerful warning to those who diminished the interpreter’s skills launched by Hunger Games, questioning their qualities as interpreters. Instead, Lawrence eats the film voraciously, pulling it out of his more aggressive, less career-mediated performance, overshadowing an excellent Robert Pattinson and making us remember how and why he came to be the star he is today, even after a sabbatical.

Table of Contents

Die My Love Movie Review: The Story Plot

In an isolated house, surrounded by dense trees and eternally plumbeian skies, a couple takes refuge to “start a new life”: she is pregnant, he from the brightest prospects. Soon, however, what is reality is convenient, because what they are about to live is anything but new and positively vital. The film follows the two – Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson) – while sinking into the bucolic, which becomes claustrophobic. The baby is born, but collapse is also born with him. She is depressed, dissociated, and unpredictable. His gaze is fixed and opaque, his sharp tongue, and his decomposed reactions. He no longer knows who he has next to him. His parents become fundamental extras, ghosts of an affection that does not console but weighs, judges, and questions. In the middle, a mysterious motorcyclist who appears and disappears, perhaps real, perhaps not. Few moments of sociability prove to be unsuccessful, imbued with unease, with restlessness. Nothing is harmless, everything is disturbed and disturbing.

The film is all about her. Everything is absorbed and respected by his unstable psyche, by his grainy pupils. Postpartum depression is only the starting point: Grace is not only a lost mother, but she is also a woman low-cut by herself. She no longer recognizes herself in any mask that society proposes to her: neither mother, wife, nor writer. It is an identity that disintegrates over time and explodes into animal chaos, made of raptus, grimaces, and crisis. The direction follows this shattering with visual and narrative coherence, immersing the viewer in an uncertain and disturbed subjective world. Grace becomes the body of an unspoken discomfort, moves like a primitive creature, screams, sweats, and disintegrates. There are no coordinates or comforts, only the abyss of inadequacy and the violent refusal of domesticity that tastes of the trap.

Die, My Love Movie Review and Analysis

Die, My Love is a perfect film in its imperfection. Directed with a solid hand, photographed with disturbing elegance, and soundproofed with hypnotic intelligence, it restores restlessness as an omnipresent mood. The assembly, at times fractured and decomposed, is the perfect mirror of a protagonist who no longer knows how to orient herself, not even within herself. The blue light that colors the shots is that of its depression: cold, unavoidable. The script dares not to explain and does not reassure, but relies on instinct. Ramsay shows once again that originality is a form of resistance, and Cannes continues to be its temple, the perfect backdrop for the celebration of the new, unexpected. And then there is her: Jennifer Lawrence. Angry, unpredictable, vulnerable, carnal, animalistic. A performance of strength and fragility, of grace and disorder. A very powerful return that sweeps away any doubt: Lawrence has not only returned but has done so with one of his most memorable portraits, which we hope will be honored with the best awards.

Die My Love Cannes 2025 (Image Credit: Black Label Media)

Die, My Love is (perhaps deliberately) the most messed-up film seen in Cannes: a work supported more by excesses than by creative solutions. Even if this was the intention of the director, the impression is that the film was edited to upset at all costs in a context such as that of the Festivals without taking care of its overall performance. Although Ramsay’s style is unquestionably valid, with solutions that still make the eyes shine for their communicative power, some sequences suffer from editing and cannot have the desired effect. The result fluctuates, at best. The fact that, in a few moments, the director still manages to find her way to the viewer’s mind beyond the screen does nothing but make it even more difficult to judge the product properly in its entirety. Jennifer Lawrence becomes in the hands of Ramsay woman, a puppet, an animal: Die’s protagonist, my love, is an iridescent female entity in conflict with her feelings.

Thus, each scene becomes an element of rupture, with the absence that turns into an unfriendly and violent nightmare. Perhaps it is not so necessary to understand a similar yearning (probably the male could not even do it, as the character of Robert Pattinson testifies), but paying the right attention proves to be fundamental to grasp the emotional need of an artist, a woman, who represents in a very personal way inevitable moments of intimate abandonment. It is not enough to exclude the game of perspectives: Die, My Love remains a film with important difficulties, both in the management of its talents and in the management of rhythm. Despite this, Ramsay is so unscrupulous that he gets rid of any weight and proceeds without fear beyond the surface. When the director moves away from the brain (which at times would push to call Mother back! by Aronofsky and focuses on his style, some moments emerge that leave their mark and grow as you move away from the vision. Such works are experiences, in all respects: stabs that strike deeply, but that change shape over time.

Die, My Love will be a niche film, nectar for particularly hardened cinephiles and for festival circuits. For most viewers, it will be a work with enormous potential that grows or repels at a distance, with reflection. Lynne Ramsay has a rare vehemence for contemporary cinema, driven by the courage to tell what she wants without compromise. If, despite everything, the film tears the flesh and impresses itself in the mind, it is because something extremely profound is perceived in that vehemence. Beyond this horror of needs and desires, there is an inner beast that has had to learn to live with pain. Grace is not an accommodating protagonist, she is at least a repulsive character. It is a painful body that rebels against domesticity, an instinctive creature that moves like a wild animal on the American prairie, too vast and too silent to contain its anguish. Grace crosses her house as if she were in a cage, in a trap. Her body becomes the main expressive vehicle of her suffering: she crawls on the floor, masturbates outdoors, disassembles herself in disorder, and does violence to herself. Jennifer Lawrence returns all of this with impressive physicality.

Her performance is edgy, raw, without ever giving in to pity or complacency. Don’t try to please, don’t try to justify, Grace. It interprets it as a painful enigma, which exists beyond judgment. It is perhaps one of his most courageous tests, and he reminded us of another divisive work that marked his career, that of Mother! by Darren Aronofsky. In contrast to Grace’s fury, Jackson is a lost figure. He is not a bad man, neither violent nor absent: he is simply inadequate. Bring an annoying dog home when his wife is unstable. He tries to talk to her in the car and ends up involved in an accident. He asks her about marriage in one of the worst moments, when every attempt at normality sounds out of place. Robert Pattinson is good at restoring this fragility: his Jackson is tender, sweet, but also frustrated and frustrating. The impression is that the character could have been more developed, and that the actor, with his well-run skills, deserves more than a relatively marginal role. But his presence works anyway, above all because it generates a sense of compassion in the viewer. After all, it is not only Grace who is broken: he too is a man who tries, in vain, to understand how one can love those who no longer want to be loved.

Lynne Ramsay builds the film like a decomposed mosaic. Music (from the ’80s to the darkest rock), square and overwhelming photography, scruffy interiors, static or disturbing shots: everything contributes to building a world that is mental rather than real. The relationship between Grace and Jackson becomes a crazy dance between attraction and repulsion, between desire and resentment, between need and despair. Every gesture of Grace is pushed to the extreme, every word seems to hold back an urgency that cannot emerge. In the final part, when everything seems destroyed, Ramsay mentions a fragile possibility of reconnection between the two protagonists. It is not a question of redemption, nor healing, it is rather a moment of contact, of mutual recognition. A song sung in the car, an image that returns (the forest on fire), a gentle gesture amid chaos: small openings that, although short, make sense of what came first.

The ending, while remaining dark and legible in different ways, traces the meaning of the entire film as a parable on the resistance of love. Not the romantic one, but the more difficult one: love that accepts the pain of the other, that recognizes him without wanting to change him, which remains even when everything is unrecognizable. Die My Love is not an easy movie. It is a work that many viewers will find repelling, difficult to digest, perhaps even frustrating in its lack of answers. There is no comfort, there is no clarity, there is no catharsis: only a slow sinking into the psyche of a woman torn by unspeakable pain. Yet precisely this elusive nature is what makes it interesting. It is a film that remains with it, which continues to work under the skin, which forces us to rethink its images, its silence, and the clues scattered along the way. Ramsay does not offer us solutions, but forces us to confront the complexity of mourning, motherhood, and love through a distorted, disturbed, deeply personal lens.

Die, My Love Movie Review: The Last Words

Die My Love is a radical, uncomfortable, and unsettling cinematic experience. Behind the apparent story of a postpartum crisis, there is probably a deeper tragedy, which is never directly revealed. Jennifer Lawrence embodies with fury and despair a woman who has herself. Robert Pattinson contrasts her with a disarming sweetness, although his character remains too marginal. Lynne Ramsay builds a visually powerful, but deliberately fragmentary and difficult to decipher film. Not everything works, but Die My Love remains a work that impresses itself, even when it rejects. With Die, My Love, Lynne Ramsay signs a vehement and delusional return. A work that transforms motherhood into a horror so intimate that it becomes universal. There are dozens of elements that deserve more space, more freedom to flow, but in its pounding rigor, Ramsay continues to surprise and make you think. Die, My Love too often risks suffering from its excesses, yet its ability to dig deep into the viewer’s mind manages to avoid an otherwise absolute collapse.

Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Pattinson, Sissy Spacek, Nick Nolte, LaKeith Stanfield

Director: Lynne Ramsay

Where We Watched: Cannes Film Festival 2025

Filmyhype.com Ratings: 3.5/5 (three and a half stars)