Ambivalence is not one of the most common angles of approach when exploring motherhood on film. Lynne Ramsay, for her part, has done it twice now. One of the lingering impressions of Ramsay’s 2011 film We Need to Talk About Kevin – other than, you know, the ending – is that Tilda Swinton gave us a mother who felt disassociated from her child, like he was some kind of alien leeching off her rather than the fruit of her womb. It’s a similar perspective that Jennifer Lawrence’s character adopts in Ramsay’s new film, Die My Love.

Lawrence, for her part, has explored this territory before as well, or at least, the period of postpartum depression that follows motherhood, irrespective of your opinion of your child. Darren Aronofsky’s mother! was a tour de force by Lawrence on the dissolution of her character’s sanity, with many different stimuli pushing her there and much shrouded in metaphor, but with her role as a potential or actual mother being central to it all. Lawrence walked us through a waking nightmare for two hours.

The combined strengths of these two women give us another harrowing portrait of the surreal chaos of new motherhood, but also its surreal boredom, which operate as dual stressors on the mind of the host. Snapping seems like the only release, though in the case of new mother Grace, it mostly does not manifest in such a grand gesture. Grace is snapping in slow motion for those two hours, in ways that shock and surprise us, and that further test every part of Lawrence’s range, with terrifying results.

Grace’s partner is Jackson (Robert Pattinson), and though he’s not a great one, neither is he a terrible one. He’s coping with new fatherhood more in terms of the minor abdications of responsibility we see in many new fathers, who “forget” to do various chores related to the baby that they find unpleasant, the excuse for which is that they’re off at work all day. It’s the one who’s stuck at home with the baby, though, who needs more help than she can express, especially when she’s been moved from New York City to rural Montana to be closer to his parents (Sissy Spacek and Nick Nolte), themselves aged to the point where they need support more than they can give it.

Ramsay’s portrait is more complicated than to say this new mother has too much on her plate and is not getting enough help from her partner. In fact, as anyone who has experienced depression knows, the ways she feels overwhelmed are not logical or necessarily defensible when spoken aloud. She’s just in the thick of a severe case of staring off into the distance and occasionally destroying a bathroom in a fit of aimless frustration, a condition exacerbated by or possibly resulting from her inability to write, which was one of the supposed benefits of moving to Montana. The baby may push this state out into full view of the world, but it’s likely only triggering something that was there already, lying dormant.

Ramsay knows that the causes of depression are many and nefarious, and as such, she does not present the action in Die My Love as a plot-heavy series of escalations that eventually engulf Grace. In fact, Grace is profoundly disturbed from close to the start of the film. As with most nightmares, there’s a sense the events might be presenting non-chronologically. For example, when Grace and Jackson get married in the later stages of the film, we wonder for a moment if we’re looking back at a happier time before this all began. It turns out they had never been married previously, and this is some sort of dramatic attempt to stabilise what has become so unstable. If you’ve seen any of the films where Ramsay stared deeply into the darkness of the human soul – You Were Never Really Here is another example – you know it probably doesn’t work.

Ramsay’s adaptation of Ariana Harwicz’ novel, which she wrote with Enda Walsh and Alice Birch, benefits from a fierce and unafraid collaborator like Lawrence. If Ramsay asked her lead actor to tear off her own skin for the role, you get the sense Lawrence would do it. Her interactions with the needy family dog, which Jackson acquired without consulting her, are particularly feral. They allow her to act out fantasies by proxy that it would be too horrible to consider enacting on her own child.

Lawrence presents both loud and quiet forms of psychosis in Die My Love, and complements it physically with her body, appearing in various states of undress, with various levels of awareness of her body’s vulnerability to both pain and pleasure. One distinction drawn between the before times and after times for Grace and Jackson is the quantity of sex they have, a standard complaint among new parents. There’s a scene where Grace negotiates an upcoming tryst, their first in more than two months, while trying to get Jackson to manufacture lust for her that he doesn’t feel. It would be more sad if it weren’t so funny, as the two actors play the scene for its inherent absurdity with expert line deliveries and at least some attempt to accommodate the needs of the other person.

When a mind is so diseased by internal traumas, whether they originated internally or externally, the needs of that mind sometimes just can’t be accommodated. Even people doing their best sometimes isn’t enough, and how often are people actually capable of doing their best? Die My Love is wildly uncertain of the possibility of happy endings, but that doesn’t mean it can’t speak to a person going through this and potentially provide a balm for them. Sometimes for a movie to see you is enough.

 

Die My Love is currently playing in cinemas.