Review: Die My Love, A Fever Dream Called Motherhood

CairoScene

26-05-2025

Review: Die My Love, A Fever Dream Called Motherhood
Jennifer Lawrence is absolutely electrifying in Lynne Ramsay's 'Die My Love'. This is without doubt her greatest performance yet. She plays a woman driven to the brink of insanity by marriage and motherhood. Her performance is raw, primal, and slightly unhinged. Lawrence doesn't so much portray despair as embody it. Her physicality is animalistic. Here's a character study of a woman at war with herself and the expectations placed upon her. I was floored by the untamed intensity of it all.
It certainly helps that you have an auteur like Lynne Ramsay behind the camera. Ramsay is a filmmaker with an unmatched eye for visual poetry. Her work on Ratcatcher remains one of the most visually original debuts I've ever seen. Here, too, she channels that same intuitive brilliance. She crafts images that feel both dreamlike and deeply visceral. This is a fever dream of a film. It sways between moods like hormonal tides raging inside the main character. One moment, she's having wild, urgent sex with her husband (Robert Pattinson). Next she's dancing with reckless abandon, as if trying to shake off the weight of her own mind.
These shifts aren't just mood swings. They're seismic emotional explosions. The film immerses us in this internal storm. It's one of the few films I've seen that understands how terrifying and ecstatic it can be to feel too much. The film drifts back and forth in time. We see fragments of before and after birth. Aunts offering unsolicited advice, wives' tales passed down like warnings, strangers talking at her baby with the entitlement of familiarity. The sudden drop in sexual intimacy. The awkward silence that follows. And then, the fierce, almost violent return of it. It's not a story about motherhood as much as it is an experience of it. Not what it is, but what it feels like. And what it feels like, here, is everything at once.
'Die My Love' feels like a spiritual cousin to last year's Nightbitch. Both films articulate the unspeakable toll of motherhood. In both, the domestic household becomes a psychological battleground. The real terror isn't monsters or killers, but the slow erasure of the self. Ramsay's film is more lyrical, more impressionistic, but no less disturbing.
I must also give praise to Nick Nolte as her father-in-law. Nolte delivers one of the most quietly powerful performances of his career. I feel Nolte has entered a remarkable phase in his late age. His voice, now weathered by time, crackles with a gravelly grace that says more than words ever could.
With 'Die My Love', Ramsay doesn't frame postpartum depression with tidy explanations. Instead, she lets us feel the weight of its disorientation. She finds a way to visually express the numbing dissociation. The flickers of sorrow that creep in unannounced. The film perfectly captures the grief of losing a part of yourself in the process of becoming someone else. It understands that depression after birth isn't just sadness. It's estrangement from your body, your partner, your child, your sense of self. 'Die My Love' honours the truth of that experience. What she and Lawrence achieve here is nothing short of extraordinary.