Director: Lynne Ramsay (UK, Canada, USA). Year of Release: 2025
The open front door of a house in Montana viewed from the back room. A couple enters and starts to look around. As she mainly stays in shot, he goes off screen to examine the other rooms. It’s nothing like New York, he says, but it has potential. Here’s somewhere where she could write the great American novel, there’s somewhere where his band could record. They just need to do some decorating and somehow take care of the mice. By the end of the scene, the couple is naked and wildly fucking on the floor.
Grace and Jordan have just inherited his uncle’s house in the country. The way in which you react to their new home may affect your general reaction to the film. More than one critic has said that the house is dilapidated and falling apart – a metaphor for their doomed relationship. For me it was larger and more luxurious than anywhere I have ever lived. This might affect your decision on whether you see Grace and Jackson as someone to be pitied or just people like you and me who are having some problems.
The following scene flash forwards a year. Grace and Jackson have a baby, presumably the result of that first day. Jackson has found a job which takes him away from home for days on end, so Grace is stuck at the home with the baby, playing annoying songs like The Chipmunks’ Let’s Twist Again on repeat. She is not responding to this well, and has developed a form of writers’ block. Throughout the film, we will see Grace deteriorate, but it’s fairly clear that she wasn’t in a great place to start with.
Jackson tries to make things easier by buying her a dog, but the dog will not stop barking at night, and robs Grace of even the ability to sleep peacefully. Besides which, leaving a needy creature with a woman who is already struggling to cope with looking after her baby is not a great idea. While Jackson is well-meaning, he’s not the sharpest tool in the box. Grace tells her boyfriend that he’s going to have to kill the dog, saying “Something you love is suffering. Put it out of its misery”. She may not just mean the dog.
While the actor formerly known as R-Pat, featured in 1000 videos with names like Robsessed, has grown up, no-one has told his face. I’m not sure whether he’s wearing designer stubble or just forgot to shave for a couple of days. Either way, he looks like a boy trapped in a man’s body. This is not necessarily bad, but it does look a bit weird. And then he smiles, and you realise why Robert Pattinson’s face was plastered onto thousands of teenage girls’ bedrooms walls.
We watch as the dream house in the countryside becomes a living hell. Grace is isolated from any old friends she may have had and despises the house parties held by the locals with whom she feels little affinity. She spends these parties insulting the guests, looking like she’d rather be anywhere else but there, and finding the nearest bottle of wine and necking as much as she can in the shortest amount of time. At one, she suddenly takes off her shirt and trousers and, in her underwear, dives into a pool full of children.
She also goes out of her way to irritate Jackson. When they’re in the car and he wants to talk, she asks him to turn off the radio, as Crossroads is playing and she hates guitar music. Later in the film, David Bowie’s Kooks is playing. She asks him to turn it up. “But you hate guitar music”, he says. “I never said that. I love guitar music”, is her reply. What is not mentioned, and I’m still not sure myself whether it’s important, is that there’s barely a guitar on Kooks.
Die My Love shares several structural similarities to Blue Valentine, which I think is the superior film, but largely because I think it’s superior to most films out there. Both follow a metrosexual young man with his blonde partner (in that case it’s Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams) through the ups and downs of a rocky relationship. Like Blue Valentine, it’s a hard watch, and this one has fewer lighter moments like Gosling playing a ukelele and singing “You always hurt the ones you love” while WIlliams dances.
Die My Love is a case study of postpartum depression, what those of us of a certain age used to know as post-natal depression. As such, the film is not a barrel of laughs, though there is some fun when Grace gets tired of using smalltalk with party guests and suddenly becomes thrillingly rude. Noticing that Grace is struggling, someone tells her sympathetically: “People don’t talk about how hard being a parent can be.” Grace replies brutally: “That’s all anyone ever talks about.” Well, I laughed.
It’s difficult to know Grace’s back story, as we only hear about her from what she says, and we have already ascertained that she is an unreliable narrator. But if we are to believe her, she is an orphan who lost her parents in a plane crash when she was 10. We see a therapist deciding that she has commitment issues, which is a reasonable conclusion to draw. But we can never really be sure what she’s thinking. She is clearly troubled, but her reluctance to open up about herself means that we can mainly only guess why.
It is similarly unclear how much of what we see on screen is actually happening or just in Grace’s imagination. Does she indulge in an affair with a passing motorcyclist? I would say no, but she certainly does in her head, which is our chief source of information. Is Jackson cheating on her? Well, maybe. What is that packet of condoms doing in his glove compartment? Are his constant denials just a form of gaslighting? But maybe he isn’t. Once more, this is largely irrelevant. It is clearly what Grace believes.
All this brings us to the question: can a film about a woman falling apart be something which we enjoy? It is clear how Die My Love can work as a psychological experiment, but is it something we should view for fun? None of this is an argument not to see a film which is quite overwhelming, but you should go to the cinema in the right frame of mind. Die My Love is not much of a date movie, but if you do take someone and they enjoy themselves, keep hold of them. They’re a stayer.
CinePhil 