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Die My Love (Lynne Ramsay, 2025)
In Scottish director Lynne Ramsay’s latest feature—her first since 2017’s You Were Never Really Here—she turns her lens once again on an inscrutable character, a misfit in society, someone as admirable in her unwillingness to abide by the rules as she is abrasive. Adapted from a novel by Argentine author Ariana Harwicz, Die My Love stars Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson as a young couple who’ve just moved from New York to a house in the husband’s rural Montana hometown.
The air is thick and humid, the decrepit house is big and lonely, and Grace (Lawrence), who gives birth early on in the movie, starts to unravel: there’s both too much to do and too little, and she begins to sink into the quagmire of isolation and postpartum depression as responsibilities of motherhood weigh her down.
Ramsay brings the novel to life with a typically precise, poetic visual and sound design, crafting something of a modern-day Gothic melodrama. Lawrence anchors the film with a performance of controlled hysteria, while Pattinson, Sissy Spacek (who plays Grace’s mother-in-law), and LaKeith Stanfield (as a neighbor who becomes an object of Grace’s fixation) add nuance and texture in supporting roles.
Die My Love is currently playing in theaters. After its premiere at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, I sat down with Ramsay for a chat about its making. She had just lost her mother days before the festival, and grief tinged her thrill at seeing audiences discover the movie.
My condolences about your mother. I’m sure this must be hard to do in the midst of all that.
Yeah, ’cause I was going to invite her here. But it’s okay. I’m at peace with it now. She lived a long life. She was 80. But she had a good mind, and she was funny. It’s always hard. Your mom, you know?
Of course. And your films are about children and mothers. This must be a bit of a head trip.
Yeah [laughs]. But in a way, it’s kind of good, because I’m not taking this too seriously. I think the first time I came here I was quite young.
With your graduate short film, Small Deaths (1996), right?
Yeah. I was really nervous. Now I feel a bit more relaxed.
This is your eighth time at Cannes. Not many people have been here eight times.
I feel a bit more like I know the drill. I remember when I came here with We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011), I was super nervous. My husband is a musician, and I held his hand so tight I nearly broke his fingers. He was like, “That’s my guitar hand!” [laughs] But this time, I feel quite relaxed. I like the film.
I read the novel by Ariana Harwicz, which the film is based on, on the flight here.
It’s a hard novel to read—to get through—because it jumps through time, and it’s quite dark as well. I didn’t really want to go that way. I changed that, skewered it. I didn’t want to do another Kevin kind of thing. That put me off, to be honest.
I don’t know if I’ve ever recovered from watching We Need to Talk About Kevin.
I know. Funnily enough, I hadn’t had any children then, but now I do. Every time a mother comes up and says, “We watched Kevin,” I’m like, “I’m sorry!” The way I looked at Die My Love is I wanted to put some humor in there, and I wanted to take some of the ideas, the themes of the novel—the animalistic kind of feeling, the sexual nature of Grace—but make it a love story. A bonkers, crazy love story, rather than a postpartum story. When people say “postpartum,” I’m like, “That’s not a postpartum movie.” It is and it isn’t.
I’d love to hear about how you translated the inner monologue of the novel into a film that keeps us at arm’s length. You’ve worked before with many novels that are told in the first person, and done very interesting things with them. With Die My Love, another filmmaker might have taken the easy route and done voiceover. But you start with this long, remote, static shot of the house; you never give us full access to the heroine’s mind.
I suppose it’s ’cause I started as a painter, and then a photographer. I’d like to be a painter again, actually; that’s my ambition. I think more in pictures than words. And that’s really handy as a filmmaker. I think of a key image. Here, the first thing was, they’re moving into this new house, and maybe they’ve lived in New York before. This is my backstory: he’s been a musician. She’s written a couple of things that got published. The house is free, but it’s in the bloody middle of nowhere.
The conventional thing to do is to shoot the house from outside. And I thought, no, I’ll shoot the house looking at them. And I’ll have them coming into the house, and we’ll do a locked-off shot. So that’s a sort of key image. It’s almost like the house is alive itself. Then you hear the rats, and there’s something a little bit ominous. But there’s hope in it, as well. The husband is saying—we’re going to do this. There’s an office upstairs for you. I’ll get my drum kit. We can do what we like here. So there’s actually hope here, before it falls apart a bit.
You were saying that you wanted to make it a love story. I was very taken by the fact that you don’t justify Grace’s psychosis and sadness, or create villains. Her husband’s trying his best. Many stories like this make the mother-in-law a shrew, but here, she’s empathetic, too. Like you say, there’s hope in the house.
Well, I thought it was much more interesting—rather than make those archetypes, like the mother-in-law and the husband that’s beating her up or something—to show that there’s real love there for her. But there’s just this misunderstanding. She’s a bit of a wild animal. She’s unconventional, almost an anarchist, you know? Kind of smashing the world up, because she’s frustrated. But I didn’t want to justify it with these easy answers. I think she’s bored; she’s got writer’s block; she and her husband are in different universes for a while. She’s just had a baby, and something starts to unravel a little bit.
What I like about all your films is that you really make us confront a kind of unknowability. Even in Kevin, and Morvern Callar (2002), you don’t explain people. There’s an unknowable kernel in people, and you make us really look at that.
That’s something I’m fascinated by. Morvern Callar was the mysterious kind. You never really knew what she’s thinking. The book is all voice, it’s all explaining her thoughts. But I didn’t do a voiceover. She was an inscrutable character, even in the novel. So I felt she should remain inscrutable, like those cowboys in westerns, riding off into the sunset. I co-wrote that movie with one of my best friends [Liana Dognini], who unfortunately died quite young. But we always thought Morvern was like a cowboy. And here I see an anarchist. I see someone who is going to burn the world down. And I think she sees a reflection of herself in her boy, and that’s terrifying.
The novel takes place in France. It’s written by Ariana Harwicz, who’s Argentine…
I met her here, and she’s amazing. She really likes it. I never met her before getting here. I was a bit like, “Oh my god, feels like I burned your book.” But actually, I think she saw that I caught the essence even if it was different.
That’s great! Was the decision to set it in the U.S. yours, or was it made before you came onto the project? Because the book is so rooted in a sense of place, in a particular kind of rural French setting and life, whereas the film feels so American. It feels steeped in the landscapes, the accents, the weather of rural Montana.
It was my decision. I thought that America’s like different countries. You go to New York and then go to Montana, and it’s a whole different ball game. If you’re living in New York and you just moved to the sticks, let’s say, it’s a massive shift. To be displaced in America… you know, a lot of people move because they don’t have enough money, they can’t stay in New York, and stuff like that. The characters get this free house, so they take it. But then she’s like, “What the fuck? I’m in the middle of nowhere. I don’t really have anything.” And probably Pam, the mother-in-law, is the one that does see her the most.
I read in an interview you did with the Criterion Collection that your mother used to watch the melodramas of Douglas Sirk and Hitchcock. There is something about Jennifer Lawrence’s character that reminded me of a classic melodrama heroine.
I love those kinds of movies. Douglas Sirk was actually quite bold, because he was doing women’s stories, where they’re the main character. He was doing loads of taboo stuff, too, you know? I take a lot of inspiration from those kinds of films, to be honest.
There’s just something about her blonde hair and her bangs, and the little pout that she has, that reminded me of those heroines.
You know, we spent a long time with the bangs. At first Jennifer was like, “I don’t want to do bangs.” And I said, “I want you to do bangs. You look shyer.” I felt like, “Oh, she’s going to freak out.” But she didn’t. She was like, “I love it. I love it.” She’s kept it.
That’s just how you saw her?
Yeah, Veronica Lake. You know?
In that same interview with Criterion, the interviewer brought up something else that I found striking: so many of your films have a shot of the character wrapping a lace curtain around their head. And it happens again here. What’s that about? Is that the key to Lynne Ramsay’s mind?
Well, it just happened, when I was doing the recce, that I went upstairs and there was just a beautiful curtain like that. And I don’t know what it is. It’s just maybe an homage to Ratcatcher (1999). But it was the first image I ever wrote. It’s a little theme. I think it’s like a shroud, slightly, you know? And it’s a bit light as well. I mean, in Ratcatcher there’s a playfulness, and then it becomes something darker. And for Grace, she’s inside this place, kind of stuck. So like being in a bell jar or something.
I’m curious about LaKeith Stanfield’s character.
He’s amazing. I’d like to do a film where he’s the main character, actually. But this is quite a small part, and it was great for him to do this. I think he really liked the script and wanted to be part of it. And the character, in the book as well—is he real or not? That’s something I wanted to play with. When Grace sees them in the car park, it’s like, “Oh god, he is real, and he’s got family, and he’s got kids.” Reality bites. People have lives on the outside. And LaKeith’s got such a powerful presence that even if it’s a small part, he really leaves an imprint.
I thought that it’s interesting that there is this Black man and Black family on the edge of this middle-class white woman’s closed-off world. Race is always a part of those classic melodramas, even if it’s not mentioned explicitly.
I think it could have been either Black or white, but I liked that. Because they’ve got a much nicer house. Like, it’s Grace and Jackson [Pattinson’s character] that have got the crappy house. LaKeith’s character probably does architecture or something, like he’s an intellectual. That’s the way I saw it. And when you see the shot of the house LaKeith stays in, it’s a really nice house. It’s just hinted at subtly.
The songs form a whole other kind of script in the film.
Well, I thought, in my backstory, that he was a failed musician, so he’ll have a big record collection. I think you see it at one point. And then I thought, when she’s bored, she just plays the same records again and again, like [Toni Basil’s recording of] “Mickey.” Also, I was working with George [Vjestica] from the Bad Seeds, the guitarist, before I made the film. I had written a lot of songs, because I was getting bored of waiting for films to happen. I thought, I’ll write songs—at least they’re instant, like Polaroids. George comes over to my apartment, I start singing this song, he starts playing. Click! It just worked. We wrote three songs in maybe half an hour. Then he asked me to come into the recording studio. I started singing this song called “Zero,” totally improvised. And that’s what ended up as the punk track at the beginning of the film.
And then I was playing “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” and Raife Burchell, the film’s music supervisor, told me to try singing it. We were in the countryside, and I just recorded it on an iPhone, and he mixed it. I hate my voice, so I tried to change it, but everyone was like, “This is awesome”—and they persuaded me to use it [as the end-credits song].
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