Jennifer Lawrence is screaming into the void. It’s unclear whether her character, Grace, actually thinks she’s turning into a dog (Ã la Amy Adams’ Nightbitch) in the new Die My Love teaser, but she doesn’t seem to be having a very human time. She barks like the family pet, licks a window, and crawls around on all fours, all in the clip’s 66-second runtime. Or maybe she’s having a deeply human experience, one that others would push down or repress. Either way, the No Hard Feelingsactor is electric as she screams at, jumps on, and at one point, circles her co-star, Robert Pattinson, in a kind of mating dance. (Side note: It’s quite fun to watch Pattinson act under an aggressively cool-toned filter again.)Â
Lynne Ramsay directed the tense drama, which Tomris Laffly called a “feral, kaleidoscopic, and gorgeously unhinged… scream of a film about feminine cravings gone unmet, that then explode” in her review for The A.V. Club. You can feel the toll of Grace’s repression in almost every frame of the teaser. “She’s plagued with this feeling that she’s disappearing,” Lawrence said of the character at a Cannes press conference, where the film premiered. (MUBI quickly scooped it up to the tune of $23 or $24 million.) The project’s logline also touches on this manic descent. “A hopeful young and loving couple (Grace and Jackson) move from New York to an inherited house in the country,” it reads. “Grace tries to find her identity with a new baby in the isolated environment. Yet as she begins to unravel, it’s not in weakness but imagination, strength and a stunning untamed vivacity that she discovers herself anew.”
Lawrence actually shot the film while she was pregnant with her own child. “For me, I was four and a half, five months pregnant when we shot,” she said. “I had great hormones! I was feeling great, which is the only way I would be able to dip into this emotion.” She also praised Ramsay’s direction, brushing off platitudes about her on-camera presence as follows: “In terms of answering any question about my acting or performance at all, I had Lynne Ramsay as my director, so that kind of is it.”
Die My Love premieres in theaters November 7. You can watch the teaser below:
