Die My Love

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

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From the uncompromising Director Lynne Ramsey (“We Need to Talk About Kevin”), is “Die, My Love” her latest feature based on the novel by Ariana Harwicz. The dark subject matter is not for everyone, but the film contains vivid startling images and a fearless no holds barred performance by Jennifer Lawrence.

Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) is a young mother saddled with a new baby and a passive but also very aggressive husband Jackson (Robert Pattinson). Grace is lackluster, distant, and spaced out. Jackson is glum and uptight. His male ego is hurt.

Grace likes to prowl about in the yard, slinking about like a cat. She carries a gleaming silver butcher knife in full view of her cooing infant. These are the most tense and uncomfortable passages in the film.

Grace wants sex but the two are on different wavelengths. At night Grace all but transforms into a base and ravenous panther.

Jackson grows more and more frustrated. He purchases a dog for a distraction.

Grace in turn becomes agitated. The dog whines and the baby screeches. At times, the house appears pregnant with ghosts. Is it rat-activity or something more sinister?

Overcome with frustration and an excess of testosterone, Jackson pins Grace in the car with the force of his body. The couple survives a car accident, injuring their dog and a horse that gallops away.

Grace is nearly catatonic. Then she claws at the bathroom, breaking appliances with superhuman strength. Grace throws herself through a glass window.

Jackson commits his wife to a mental hospital.

After a few months, Grace is released only to be sarcastic and biting at an exclusive party.

Although at times over the top, the episodes in the film are painstaking, unsparing and authentic with Lawrence ‘s singularly eccentric and very scary performance.

The film points to many sources from Gothicism, Brian De Palma’s “Carrie,” Stanley Kubrick, and Grimm’s Fairy Tales. The tone shifts from eerie meditations to very jolting auditory shocks, some of them quite viscerally throttling the heart.

This is a very alarming and vivid portrait of a mother with postpartum depression. It is extremely authentic aside from some overacting and chewing of the scenery from Robert Pattinson. Yet even this reservation will surely remind some of Jack Nicholson in “The Shining.”

Sissy Spacek and Nick Nolte appear as enigmatic and uneasy relatives with troubled pasts.

Unnerving, dispassionate and unabashed, director Ramsey is an acquired taste, but she has a language with her own point of view, and she is often as fierce and daring as her subjects.

Write Ian at ianfree11@yahoo.com