Die My Love
Based on Wikipedia: Die My Love
A Fire in the Forest
Jennifer Lawrence walks into a fire. That's not a spoiler—it's an invitation. Because the question that drives Lynne Ramsay's 2025 psychological drama Die My Love isn't whether its protagonist will survive, but whether we'll understand how she got there. And understanding that journey means confronting something our culture prefers to ignore: the way motherhood can fracture a mind.
The film, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2025 and earned Lawrence a Golden Globe nomination, adapts Argentine novelist Ariana Harwicz's 2012 work Matate, amor—literally "Kill yourself, my love" in Spanish. Martin Scorsese discovered the book through his filmmaker book club and immediately thought of Lawrence for the role. He sent it to her production company, Excellent Cadaver, and the project began its slow burn toward the screen.
Montana Gothic
Grace and Jackson are a young couple who inherit a house in rural Montana after Jackson's uncle dies. They leave New York behind, and Grace gives birth to a baby boy shortly after they settle in. The setting seems idyllic—wide open spaces, a fresh start, the American pastoral dream.
But something is wrong. Jackson works long hours away from home. Grace finds herself marooned with an infant in a house where silence becomes oppressive and the forest surrounding her feels less like nature and more like a cage. When she discovers condoms in Jackson's car, he claims they belong to a friend named Greg. She doesn't believe him.
The isolation metastasizes.
Grace begins masturbating in the woods. She visits her mother-in-law Pam, seeking connection, but flees when the conversation turns to her own mental state. She learns a disturbing detail about the house: Jackson's uncle didn't just die there—he killed himself in a grotesquely unusual manner, shooting himself through his rectum. Grace can't stop asking why. Why that method? Why that death? The question echoes through the film like a recurring chord.
The Dog That Wouldn't Stop Barking
One of the film's most unsettling sequences involves a dog. Jackson brings one home without consulting Grace. It barks constantly. It cannot be soothed.
Then the dog is hit by a car.
"Something you love is suffering," Grace tells Jackson. "Put it out of its misery."
He refuses. He'll take it to the vet tomorrow. But Grace doesn't wait. She shoots the dog herself.
This is the kind of scene that divides audiences. Is Grace a monster? Is she merely doing what her husband lacks the courage to do? Or is this the act of a woman so desperate to end suffering—any suffering—that she's rehearsing something darker?
Postpartum Psychosis: The Condition Nobody Talks About
To understand Die My Love, you need to understand what postpartum psychosis actually is—and how it differs from the more commonly discussed postpartum depression.
Postpartum depression affects roughly one in seven new mothers. Its symptoms include persistent sadness, exhaustion, difficulty bonding with the baby, and intrusive thoughts about harming oneself or the child. It's serious, it's treatable, and in recent years it's become something people actually discuss.
Postpartum psychosis is rarer and far more severe. It occurs in approximately one to two out of every thousand births. Women experiencing it may have hallucinations, delusions, severe mood swings, confusion, and a complete break from reality. They may believe things that aren't true—that their baby has been replaced, that they've been chosen for a divine mission, that they need to die. Unlike depression, which tends to develop gradually over weeks, psychosis often strikes suddenly in the first two weeks after birth. It's a psychiatric emergency.
Grace exists somewhere in this territory. Her behavior becomes increasingly erratic: she walks around carrying knives, throws herself through a glass door, begins an affair with a stranger on a motorcycle. These aren't the actions of someone who is merely sad. They're the actions of someone whose connection to reality has frayed.
A Wedding and Its Aftermath
Despite everything—the fights, the dog, the knives—Jackson proposes. They get married.
The wedding starts beautifully. But by night's end, Jackson refuses to kiss Grace when she asks repeatedly. He leaves her alone on the dance floor. She goes to the bridal suite by herself.
What happens next is one of Lawrence's most harrowing scenes. Waiting for Jackson, Grace asks a receptionist to bring ice for champagne. When he refuses, she apparently invites him to her room to sing for her. She dances. Then she smashes her head into a mirror, splitting her forehead open. The next morning, she walks home pushing the baby's stroller, bleeding from her head, until Jackson finds her on the road.
He commits her to a psychiatric institution.
The House That Changed
When Grace is released, her therapist has suggested she has abandonment issues stemming from her parents' deaths when she was a child. She seems better. But the world she returns to has shifted.
Jackson has remodeled the house. New paint. New furniture. A new car—another gift, he says, from Greg. Grace asks the same question she asked about the suicide: why would someone give such an extravagant gift? The film never answers. It leaves us wondering whether Jackson's infidelity is with a woman, with Greg, or whether Grace's suspicions are themselves a symptom of her illness.
At a welcome-back party, guests tell Grace how "healthy" and "well" she looks. She snaps. Jackson takes her for a drive to calm her down. She finds more condoms in the glove box.
"You don't see me," she tells him.
They stop the car. Sit in silence. Grace kisses him, says "Enough," and walks into the forest.
She burns her psychiatric journal. She removes her dress. Jackson runs after her, but he's too late. She walks into the flames.
Lynne Ramsay's Long Silence
Die My Love is Lynne Ramsay's first film since You Were Never Really Here in 2017—an eight-year gap that makes this one of the most anticipated returns in recent cinema. The Scottish director is known for psychological intensity, visual poetry, and an unflinching willingness to inhabit damaged minds.
Her previous work, We Need to Talk About Kevin from 2011, also dealt with the shadows of motherhood—specifically, a mother trying to understand how she raised a school shooter. When Lawrence approached her about Die My Love, Ramsay initially declined. She'd already explored postpartum territory. She offered Lawrence a different project instead.
Lawrence refused. She wanted this film, with this director.
Ramsay relented, but she reframed the material. This wouldn't be a movie "about" postpartum depression. It would be, in her words, "a bonkers, crazy love story." She's also called it a dark comedy—her kind of comedy, she clarified, which means "dark and fucked-up."
The Scorsese Connection
Martin Scorsese's involvement is more than a footnote. He and Lawrence had previously discussed adapting Kate Chopin's 1899 novel The Awakening—another story about a woman's psychological disintegration, one that ends with its protagonist walking into the ocean. They eventually chose Die My Love instead, seeing it as a more challenging role.
It's worth noting the parallels. Both stories feature women who feel trapped by domestic life. Both end with their protagonists walking into an element—water, fire—as a final act of either liberation or destruction. The question of whether these endings represent tragedy or transcendence is something neither work answers definitively.
Robert Pattinson Learns to Dance
Robert Pattinson plays Jackson, and his casting adds an interesting dimension. Pattinson has spent the past decade deliberately choosing difficult, unconventional roles—from the vampire boyfriend of Twilight to the grimy hustlers of the Safdie brothers' Good Time to the Dark Knight himself. He's built a career on subverting expectations.
One of the film's most discussed scenes involves a dance sequence that terrified him. He tried to convince Ramsay and Lawrence to cut or choreograph it. They refused. He took dancing lessons.
Pattinson has described the set environment as "unusual." In one instance, he arrived to shoot a scene with three or four pages of dialogue, only to have Ramsay announce she wanted to do it with no dialogue at all. "It's kind of scary," he said, "but it's very, very exciting. It makes you feel very alive."
Lawrence Pregnant, Playing Psychotic
Perhaps the most striking production detail: Jennifer Lawrence was four and a half months pregnant when filming began. She was playing a woman destroyed by the hormonal aftermath of pregnancy while herself pregnant.
She's been candid about the strange irony. "What my character goes through is the hormonal imbalance that comes from postpartum," she told interviewers. "I had great hormones! I was feeling great, which is the only way I would be able to dip into this emotion."
But life had more in store. By the time the film premiered, Lawrence had given birth to her second child and experienced what she called "a really hard postpartum" period. Watching the finished film after going through that herself, she said, was "really bizarre... after feeling like I've been through that forest."
That metaphor—"been through that forest"—lands differently once you've seen the film's ending.
The Visual Language
Cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, who previously worked with Ramsay on We Need to Talk About Kevin, shot the film on 35mm film rather than digital. He chose an aspect ratio of 1.33:1—the boxy, nearly square frame that was standard before widescreen became dominant in the 1950s.
His inspirations were two Roman Polanski films from the 1960s: Repulsion and Rosemary's Baby. Both are psychological horror films about women whose grip on reality slips. Repulsion follows a young woman alone in an apartment as she descends into violent madness. Rosemary's Baby features a pregnant woman who becomes convinced her neighbors are part of a satanic cult—and turns out to be right.
The boxy frame serves a purpose. It emphasizes claustrophobia. Even when Grace is outdoors in the Montana wilderness, the frame closes in on her. The landscape doesn't offer freedom; it offers isolation.
A Polarized Response
The film's reception tells a story of division. Critics were largely positive—74 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, a score of 72 on Metacritic. Deadline Hollywood suggested Lawrence deserved an Academy Award. The BBC declared she was "better than ever." Time magazine called her performance "the kind you go to the movies for."
But audiences felt differently. CinemaScore, which polls moviegoers as they exit theaters, gave Die My Love a D+. For context, that's an unusually low grade—the kind typically reserved for films that actively anger their audiences.
Why the gap? One possibility: critics are accustomed to challenging material and appreciate formal experimentation. General audiences expecting a more conventional thriller—or perhaps expecting Lawrence's trademark warmth and likability—found something far more abrasive. The film doesn't want you to be comfortable. It doesn't want you to like Grace. It wants you to understand her, which is harder.
Owen Gleiberman of Variety criticized the film as "overdetermined," suggesting it approached motherhood's burdens too much like a thesis statement. A Washington Post critic found it "baffling at best and exploitative at worst" in how it handled postpartum illness.
What the Film Doesn't Explain
Some of Die My Love's most compelling elements are the questions it refuses to answer.
Is Jackson actually cheating? With whom? Are Grace's suspicions evidence of her psychosis or her clarity?
Why did Jackson's uncle kill himself in such a bizarre manner? Is there something about this house, this land, this family that produces madness?
When Grace walks into the fire, is she dying? Is she being reborn? Is this tragedy or liberation?
The film declines to resolve these ambiguities. It trusts audiences to sit with discomfort, to resist the urge to diagnose and categorize. Grace is not a case study. She's a human being whose interior experience exceeds what can be captured in clinical language.
The Box Office and What It Means
By late December 2025, Die My Love had grossed approximately $11.5 million worldwide—$5.5 million domestically, $6 million internationally. It opened at number eight, making between $2.6 and $2.8 million on 1,983 screens.
These are modest numbers by blockbuster standards. But they're significant for Lynne Ramsay, whose previous films have been critical darlings with limited commercial reach. Die My Love is now her highest-grossing film ever.
Mubi, the distribution company, paid $24 million for rights across multiple territories—their largest acquisition to date. They committed to a 45-day theatrical run on 1,500 screens, a substantial bet on a difficult film finding an audience.
After Cannes
Ramsay re-edited the film following its Cannes premiere. This isn't unusual—many filmmakers continue tinkering after festival debuts—but it suggests she wasn't fully satisfied with the initial cut. The version audiences saw in November 2025 may differ meaningfully from what played in France.
The film subsequently screened at festivals in San Sebastián, Vienna, London, Rome, and Stockholm, often in premium slots. At San Sebastián, it was paired with a ceremony honoring Lawrence with the Donostia Award, the festival's lifetime achievement recognition.
The Ensemble
While Lawrence dominates the screen, the supporting cast adds texture. LaKeith Stanfield plays Karl, whose role in the narrative remains somewhat mysterious. Nick Nolte appears as Harry, Jackson's late father, presumably in flashbacks. Sissy Spacek plays Pam, the widowed mother-in-law who becomes a complicated source of non-support for Grace.
Spacek's presence carries particular resonance. She won an Academy Award playing a deeply troubled young woman in 1980's Coal Miner's Daughter, and her most iconic role is Carrie White—the telekinetic teenager who burns down her high school prom in Carrie. Having Spacek in a film that ends with a woman walking into fire adds an intertextual layer that cinephiles will appreciate.
What the Title Means
The original Spanish title, Matate, amor, translates roughly to "Kill yourself, my love." English doesn't quite capture the intimacy of that construction—the way "amor" makes the command tender even as it instructs death.
The English title, Die My Love, preserves some of this ambiguity. Who is speaking? To whom? Is it a command or a plea? Is "my love" the addressee or an exclamation—as in "die, my love, it's the only way"?
By the film's end, you might read it as Grace speaking to herself. Or Jackson speaking to Grace. Or the film speaking to us, warning that love in its most extreme form can become indistinguishable from destruction.
The Forest at the End
Fire is rarely neutral in storytelling. It destroys and purifies. It kills and transforms. Ancient myths are full of figures who walk through flames and emerge changed—or don't emerge at all.
Grace burning her psychiatric journal before walking into the fire suggests she's destroying the record of her institutionalization—rejecting the clinical framework imposed on her experience. Removing her dress could signal vulnerability, or a return to some primal state, or simply the practical consideration that fabric catches fire.
Jackson runs after her. We don't see what happens next.
The film refuses to tell us whether he saves her, whether she dies, whether there's any saving to be done. It ends on his running, on her walking, on the flames spreading through the Montana trees.
Some viewers will find this maddening. Others will recognize it as the most honest possible ending. Mental illness doesn't resolve neatly. Marriages in crisis don't always find their way back. Sometimes people walk into fires, literal or metaphorical, and the people who love them can only run behind, too late, understanding nothing.