Review of Die My Love, directed by Lynne Ramsay

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

I feel like a lot of my blog introductions, especially when it comes to movies, have been lamenting on the fact I don’t have a ton of time lately. I used to work as a film critic (which, in fact, was so incredibly underpaid that I now make more off of this blog’s display ads than I ever did publishing anywhere else), and then when I was in graduate school I was writing a lot about film, so I used to watch so many movies.

But now I work an 8-5, come home, and then doom scroll my evenings away instead of watching the movies I used to love so dearly. And recently I realized I want to stop doing that, so I’ve set limits on my phone and am fully prepared to sit back and watch more movies and read more books in order to feed my brain.

So Die My Love is actually a movie I wanted to see when it first came out, then I was stubborn and refused to get a MUBI subscription after all of the controversies that came out with them. The one and only time I cracked, to see this and another movie, I saw the subscription price and decided I wasn’t going to go for it at that time.

How I ended up watching this movie is simple: one day I was wandering my local library branch, saw that it was available in the new DVD section, then realized this was my time. I checked it out immediately and was happy as a clam when I popped it into the DVD player we have at home.

All of that said, let’s get into the review! I don’t want to ramble too much in the introduction.

After moving into a rural Montana home, a woman becomes consumed by her mental health and dying relationship with her partner.

Die My Love is a wild ride, but it doesn’t start out this way. Jackson, the male lead in this movie, inherits a home from his uncle in Montana after he dies, and Jackson decides to relocate there from New York with Grace, the female lead and protagonist, from New York. It’s a sharp change for them both, but especially for Grace, who is pregnant with their child. She gives birth to their son not long after moving, and things seem peaceful in the beginning.

It’s when they really get settled in that the duo starts to experience problems. Jackson has to leave home for long stretches of time for work, leaving Grace by herself. There isn’t much to do in this cabin, and Grace finds herself feeling isolated and depressed because he’s not there. These feelings start to get worse after she discovers some condoms in his car, implying he might not be faithful to her.

Jackson’s father dies, then, when meeting with his mother, Grace learns that the uncle committed suicide in the home that they live in now. Not long after that Jackson randomly comes home with a dog, which irritates Grace because it lacks any training and barks constantly. When she’s alone with the dog she finds herself rolling her eyes and wanting to yell at it constantly, then fights with Jackson about it.

It’s while they’re on a drive that the car gets injured in an accident. Grace insists that Jackson kill the dog to put it out of her misery, but he says no and that he’ll take it to the vet the next day. She grabes the gun and shoots the dog, killing it and pissing Jackson off even more.

From this moment on, Grace starts acting even more inconsistently. She picks up knives and starts walking around with them, then starts an affair with a man who drives by their house on his bike. When Jackson goes to bury the dog, she throws herself through the glass door of their home, injuring herself in the process. Their constant arguing doesn’t help her behavior and she starts becoming uncontrollable.

Jackson asks her to marry him despite this, but when Grace asks for a kiss, he leaves her behind on the dancefloor. Grace goes into the bridal suite and asks a concierge to sing for her. She then slams her head into the mirror and walks home by herself, with no shoes on, the next morning with the baby. When Jackson finds her, he puts her into a psychiatric ward.

It’s there we learn the abandonment issues stem from the death of her parents as a child, then she improves. She comes home to discover that Jackson has completely redone the house and purchased a new car, making their home unrecognizable. He’s also named their baby after his dead father.

They have a party for her return, but Grace snaps when people say she looks better. Jackson takes her out for a drive and to breathe, but she says she doesn’t want to go back. They stop and say nothing, but then Grace kisses him and simply says “Enough.” She goes into the forest, sets her book on fire, strips, then walks into the fire as Jackson watches horrified.

Overall Thoughts

Something I was thinking about while I was watching this movie was about how it humanized Grace, Jennifer Lawrence’s character, and her struggles. We really do see everything from her perspective, especially when it comes to Jackson’s failures, but I do wonder what her mental health looked like before they moved to Montana. Was she happier in New York? Did he force this decision to move?

That said, this is a complicated movie. I think some people would be quick to demonize her because she’s a woman with some issues—historically, women have been demonized for expressing their needs in moments like these, and people do tend to dance around the issue of her health around the movie except when she snaps at that party.

I’m glad I finally got to watch this movie. I don’t know if I would watch it again, but I think it’s something I’m going to be chewing on in the near future, especially if I start with academic film writing again. It’s a case study for the “madwoman in the attic” stereotype, with a lot of despair to sort out the humanity of the characters involved.

I say go see it if it interests you! I could see how this might not be someone’s cup of tea in the end though.

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