Die, My Love: Jennifer Lawrence takes it all, but… (review)

Lynne Ramsay traps a couple in the space-time warp of their chaotic relationship. Jennifer Lawrence feverishly keeps Robert Pattinson in check. That’s already it!

Scenes from married life arty and desperate. This Die, My Love – presented last year in competition at Cannes – fuels the mood swings of a production in tune with a subject that the Scotswoman only considers in her entrenchments. Lynne Ramsay immediately locks Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson in a shack in the countryside, watching them from a distance like lab mice. The film thus opens with a strict and still shot of a (little) sweet home whose perspective fails miserably on a shabby living room. Our two lovebirds tour the owner.

Upstairs we hear rodents moving freely. The bodies heat up a little, a lot… In fact (already) not very passionately. The couple is on the edge of an abyss that he did not see coming, too happy to have inherited the house of his recently deceased uncle where he can lead a petty bourgeois life (combo: child and pet). She already feels in her flesh that the thing is wrong: “How long has it been since we last fucked?“

The programmatic title, like the opening shot, has already said it all. There will be howling, a kid screaming, a dog barking, cautious in-laws… Lynne Ramsay (We Need to Talk About Kevin, A Beautiful Day…), as we know, is not a lacemaker. The novel by Argentinian Ariana Harwicz that she adapts here is structured into a long monologue of a desperate mother. The opportunity for the 55-year-old filmmaker to consider the story as a slow mental wavering whose assumed redundancy would be charged with electricity at each turn. For this to produce something other than cliché, you have to know how to look – and find! – mystery in the middle of the painting. Ramsay settles on these faults and works to plug all the holes with his big hooves.

Jennifer Lawrence paces the family lawn like a feline, a knife between her teeth. Robert Pattinson, with his lantern on duty, tries to deceive. But the game is unequal. The actress, brilliant, takes everything away. The film is on his side. The staging is intended to be brutal but in reality is bathed in affectation: work on sound that is too studied, additional music that is too appropriate, points of tension that are too expected and allegories that are too pubescent (the flames as a representation of a domestic hell, help!) This Die, My love is a mannered auteurist object limited in its purpose. On the periphery, Sissy Spacek as a desolate and somewhat jilted mother-in-law illuminates this darkness. During a chaotic sequence, Nick Nolte does not, however, reassure about his state of health. And meanwhile, baby cries but eventually gets out of the frame. He is quite right.

By Lynne Ramsay. With Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Pattinson, Sissy Spacek, Nick Nolte… Duration: 1h58. Released April 29, 2026