I’m amazed at how many of “the best films of 2025” have left me pretty cold. Die My Love joins the list alongside the likes of Sinners, The Mastermind and Bugonia – everyone loves them, but I thought they were just OK.
I did like Die My Love, though, particularly the florid performance by Jennifer Lawrence as a woman losing her mind in a severe case of post-partum depression. Possibly. It’s never entirely spelled out, but then that’s often the case with diagnosing the baby blues too.
It’s a one-woman show offering co-star billing but not oodles to do to Robert Pattinson, who plays Jackson, the partner of Grace (Lawrence), who has brought the love of his life to live in his dead uncle’s remote home, where she first falls pregnant and then fall out of love with just about everything. Sissy Spacek gets even less to do as Jackson’s mother, increasingly resented by Grace. And Nick Nolte turns up as Jackson’s father in a role so truncated you wonder why anyone bothered.
It’s a tale of escalating woe, Grace gradually losing her shit while everyone dances around her in a concerned way, which Ramsay does as a ghost story without ghosts, in a haunted house without a haunting. A one-woman show of going crazy, starting with the domestic (Grace wandering about the house with one tit hanging out) but spreading out into the wider world (bawling at a blameless shop worker in the local store) as Grace goes increasingly banzai.
Ramsay claims to have been influenced by Polanski’s Repulsion and its sense of mounting gothic dread, as expressed through the eye of another blonde, Catherine Deneuve, losing her mind at home alone. Polanski’s voiceover on the DVD version of that film makes disapproving noises about his use of the “artsy fartsy”. Maybe Ramsay has listened to it because she stays away from the more extravagant externalisations of inner trauma. A bit of day for night shooting here, the expressive use of silence there, everyday objects seen from unusual angles, plus inspired little visual choices dotted all the way through.
Talking of actors with not much to do, LaKeith Stanfield as a mystery local who drifts by occasionally on his motorbike. But beneath those leathers a sexy man. Can you guess where this is going?
Uncle Frank, who once owned this house, what happened to him, how did he die? Is this a story about loneliness? Is Grace going mad because that’s what would happen to anyone left alone for long periods of time with a baby? Is this a story not about a woman, but a person? Ramsay dabbles with film noir looks, and occasionally presents her star as the femme fatale. For Die My Love read Murder, My Sweet?
As well as noir there are dives into the adjacent realm of the psychologically abnormal, and reminders of films in which the likes of Barbara Stanwyck and Olivia de Havilland would be monstered by their own aberrant psyches. It is all very good, expertly done by Ramsay and the brilliant DP Seamus McGarvey, but there is simply too much of it. Like Bugonia and The Mastermind, which had exactly the same problem, it’s a B movie that’s somehow escaped its moorings and has become bloated on its star names and its director’s fancies. Cut half an hour, as an old school movie mogul would have done, and you’d have a much better film.
A film of nearly two hours needs more nuance or more event and there isn’t much of either to be seen, though you have to hand Lawrence all the awards for ringing the changes with her kettle-drum concerto for expressive faces.
You can see why Lawrence wanted to make it. It’s an actor’s big chance to do all the things that get them nominated for stuff – snot, nudity, shouting. Apparently she had to talk Ramsay into taking on the film. The director was reluctant to dive back into the realm of aberrant behaviour after We Need to Talk About Kevin. Maybe Ramsay should have stuck with her gut.
Die My Love – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
