Jennifer Lawrence enacts an updated Yellow Wallpaper in Die, My Love trailer

While The Yellow Wallpaper seems an obvious enough inspiration, Lynne Ramsey’s Die, My Love is adapted from Ariana Harwicz’s novel of the same name. Ramsey moves the plot from the book’s French countryside to the rural U.S., where Grace (Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson) relocate from New York. There, Grace feels the passion in her marriage drain away, along with her motivation to keep living. “I’m stuck between wanting to do something and not wanting to do… anything at all,” she admits in the Die, My Love trailer. 

“There’s not really anything like postpartum. It’s extremely isolating,” Lawrence reflected on the character’s journey at a Cannes Film Festival press conference (via IndieWire). “Lynne moves this couple into Montana. She doesn’t have a community. She doesn’t have her people, but the truth is, extreme anxiety and extreme depression [are] isolating no matter where you are. You feel like an alien. So it deeply moved me.”

It was Martin Scorsese, a producer on the film, who first read Harwicz’s novel in a book club. He passed it along to Lawrence (who is set to star in Scorsese’s What Happens At Night), encouraging her to produce and star in the Die, My Love adaptation. “I wanted to work with Lynne Ramsay since I saw Ratcatcher, and I was just like, there’s no way,” Lawrence said at Cannes. “But we took a chance and we sent it to her, and I really cannot believe that I’m here.”

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