The short, dense novel “Die, My Love“ by Ariana Harwicz is written as an inner monologue. The observations, feelings, and set pieces of a family story are wildly strung together as they tumble through the mind of a young mother on the verge of psychosis. A stranger appears there whose gaze at the woman is also in her imagination. Frustration, contempt, violence, and sexuality simmer beneath the text, and the anchoring of what is said in an external reality becomes increasingly questionable.

Director Lynne Ramsay likes to explore extreme psychological situations in her films. In RATCATCHER (1999), a 12 year old has to deal with his complicity in the death of a friend, in WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN (2011) Tilda Swinton plays the mother of a psychopathic son, and in YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE, Joaquin Phoenix is a traumatized killer named Joe. In her adaptation of Harwicz’ novel, Ramsay translates the eminently literary form of an inner monologue into an almost exclusively visual format. There’s no voice-over as a bridge when images in which Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) drags herself through her everyday routine like in a trance, crawling through the grass, or having a tantrum alternate with scenes that may stem from her memory or imagination.

Whose consciousness is being shown here remains vague. Is it Grace who sees herself losing ground or her husband Jackson (Robert Pattinson) who becomes more and more removed or is the remote house that both of them move into at the beginning of the film an observing entity? Both involved and distanced, from above and from within, the film shows how the supposed rural idyll becomes a trap of boredom and responsibility for Grace. She is always used, no one needs her. She is primarily a body, a mother’s body. Aimless and without a foothold, she goes through a sequence of fluctuating states of consciousness, playfulness, sensuality, depression, aggression, dissociation, and delusion.

In doing so, Ramsay leaves the terrain of logic and plot to such an extent that at times the film seems like an experiment in film-making, an exercise in creating the greatest possible intensities. Jennifer Lawrence is central in this, taking on her role with a vehemence which eclipses all of the other actors.

Hendrike Bake

Translation: Elinor Lewy