Motherhood is a beast. In Die My Love, the latest film by Scottish director Lynne Ramsay, Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) comes to understand this all too well. After moving to Montana to begin a quiet life with her family, she soon becomes smothered by both the tidal wave of postpartum depression and the bitterness that accompanies such pain, as Grace is shown how little the world, including her own husband (Robert Pattinson), cares about half the population suffering through “the most natural thing in the world.” The only thing to do, Grace decides, is absolutely lose it. It’s not that she has an issue attaching to her infant son, she says. It’s “everything else that’s fucked.” So much is fucked in Ramsay’s small but mighty filmography—five features, a handful of shorts, and a mini documentary made for fashion brand Miu Miu—though it’s an oeuvre that’s the envy of directors with double her experience.
Over nearly 30 years, Ramsay has created a quintet of films bound together by her distinct fascination with trauma. She is an uncompromising director, one who would rather walk away from a project than concede to a dilution of her ideas, which typically eschew dialogue for sensory experiences. In her films, Ramsay seeks out poetry, catharsis, and even humor in the darkest moments of human life.
In Grace, Ramsay finds a heroine whose pain takes no prisoners. A New Yorker who moves to the countryside where her husband, Jackson, is from, she cannot help but feel smaller in this community where everyone knows everything about each other. When they arrive at their new home, inherited from an uncle who died by suicide, it’s a ramshackle building that Ramsay and cinematographer Seamus McGarvey shoot like a scene from The Shining. A writer like Jack Torrance, Grace will see this place become her Overlook Hotel.
After the birth of her son, Grace tries to fit into a world that is not naturally hers, one of domesticity, femininity, and picture-perfect familial bliss. Die My Love uses the Academy frame, a 1.33:1 aspect ratio, to limit its perspective and offer a portrait-like view of Grace, made all the more potent by Lawrence’s best performance in years. We get a sense of her before things fell apart, the kind of forceful personality who had wild sex in the grass with her hot husband and danced freely through the hallways. But motherhood, through Ramsay’s lens, leads Grace to dissociate, which evolves into a pure sensory assault. Grace’s dripping breast milk mingles with the ink she tries to wield into a new story. The sounds of the countryside grow louder, like the buzzing of the bees and the barking of a tragic dog, as Grace’s psychosis leaves her raw as a live wire. What was once tranquil is now unbearable. There’s a Cassavetes-esque quality to her fury, a woman long past the verge of a nervous breakdown—a quintessentially Ramsay-esque figure.
These figures were there from the start: The guilt that plagues the young boy who leads Ratcatcher, Ramsay’s debut feature, is so unbearable that it inspires a jaunt into the surreal. In 1970s Glasgow, James (William Eadie) struggles with the reality of his working-class life as well as the death of his friend, for which he blames himself. Inspired by a real-life waste collectors’ strike, Ramsay’s film tapped into the contrast of filth and fantasy that separated adults and children. “I remember it as a time of terrible turmoil in Britain. It was magical for kids because it was lawless, like a fairytale,” Ramsay explained to The Guardian.
While Ratcatcher earned several comparisons to the social grit of Ken Loach, its off-kilter and tactile approach to James’ story felt more like a Terence Davies film. Ramsay never shies away from the deprivation or domestic strife that defines James’ life, but her lens is also kind. It embodies the often unreliable grip on truth and memory that children possess; there is a curious magic to James’ city, a playground of trash and danger made innocuous through a child’s gaze. When James wraps himself cocoon-like in the gauzy lace of his mother’s curtains, it’s a representation of that more ephemeral relationship with reality. His late friend’s mother gives James a pair of the boy’s new shoes, which James scuffs at with his dirty hands, as though the shiny leather is too potent a reminder of the death that haunts him. James may lack the agency of Grace to fully express himself during his struggles, but Ramsay always captures the physical moments that speak louder than words.
Grace’s “unbecoming” responses to her woes make her a welcome bedfellow to the eponymous protagonist of Morvern Callar, as played by Samantha Morton. On Christmas morning, the unremarkable Morvern, a supermarket worker in a small Scottish town, finds that her boyfriend has died by suicide. He’s left behind a mixtape and his finished novel, which he asks her to guide to publication. Her stillness in the face of death seems unnerving. We expect screaming, sobbing, maybe even pleading, but not this. Nor do we expect Morvern to go on about her life as though nothing has happened; she dumps her boyfriend’s body and puts her name on his novel.
Whereas Grace’s deterioration becomes primal, Morvern is unnervingly still. To an outsider, she seems perfectly normal—at first. For the audience, who knows her loss, we are forced to wonder if she is broken, unfeeling, or something far worse. Yet, the grieving process is still evident. Morvern goes through all five stages, just without the public display of penitence that society expects or even demands. When Morvern goes clubbing, the retina-burning colors engulf her, though she remains serene amid the energy. She dissociates from the blaring experiences around her, from nightclub dancing to the holiday in Spain she takes with a friend who admits to sleeping with her boyfriend. When Morvern cuts up her boyfriend’s corpse, we only realize what she’s doing when Ramsay shows the blood that squirts on her skin. The cathartically visceral is denied in favor of the sensual, even around something as horrific as this.
In Spain, Morvern’s behavior becomes more openly erratic, seemingly brought to life by the blazing sun and the decidedly un-Scottish landscapes of Spain. In the club, the music is sometimes too loud or muffled, echoing the feeling of an intoxicated night out, while the garish lights batter the crowds and the strobes reveal too much. Ramsay makes Morvern both passive observer and the beating heart of this sensation; dissonant and evocative, confusing and clarifying. In the end, back at another wild rave, Morvern blocks out the industrial drone with the Mamas And The Papas crooning “Dedicated To The One I Love.” It’s a song her boyfriend chose for her on a mixtape he left behind along with his corpse. There’s a haunting inner peace to this elegiac love song, while the world screams on around her. Ramsay overloads her audience alongside her leads, throwing them into a mental and emotional freefall that does not need exposition to explain it.
But Grace’s closest partner in the cohort of traumatized Ramsay protagonists is Eva, the guilt-laden parent of a murderer in We Need To Talk About Kevin. As played by Tilda Swinton, Eva is a self-made woman shrunken into bitterness by the arrival of her first child. Kevin isn’t a good kid. He cries all the time, and she never seems to connect with him. Her fears are dismissed by her dopey husband. When baby Kevin refuses to sleep, she tells him, “Mommy was happy before Kevin came along.” His maturation into a school shooter who may have only perpetrated his crimes to spite Eva makes her terror all the more potent—but so does the audience’s eagerness to blame her for it all. Nature? Nurture? Or just plain fate?
Whether she acknowledges it or not, Eva and Kevin are very similar. Ramsay visualizes their connections frequently, like the odd way they both eat scrambled eggs or their mirrored body language during her prison visits. They stare at one another with an adversarial recognition. Swinton and Ezra Miller have a strong enough resemblance to make their bond all the tougher to ignore. Like Morvern, Eva is constantly bathed in color. Red is both freeing—the thrilling bombardment of tomatoes at a Spanish festival she attends—and constricting—the flashing red lights of the police car as Kevin is arrested, and the bloodlike sprays of paint that tar her now-infamous home. “I’m going straight to hell,” she tells two visiting missionaries. You believe it.
Ramsay has joked that Die My Love is a black comedy, which is a comment she also made frequently about You Were Never Really Here. That’s certainly indicative of her bleak sense of humor, given that the latter movie is about an emotionally splintered Iraq veteran who rescues trafficking victims from powerful pedophiles. Based on a novella by Jonathan Ames, Ramsay’s adaptation strips the source material to the bone and, alongside star Joaquin Phoenix, remolds it into a raw-nerve thriller of PTSD and failed revenge. Joe, the reluctant hero, is a man of methodical violence, one whose weapon of choice against abusers is a hammer purchased from a local hardware store.
Ramsay told Phoenix that the inside of Joe’s head sounded like an endless barrage of fireworks, a sensation evoked for the viewer through Jonny Greenwood’s disjointed and abrasive score. But even in moments of stillness, the tempest within Joe’s mind is always evident. Past and present fight for dominance, struggling to make sense of the here and now, an impressionistic choice Ramsay and her editor Joe Bini also made for We Need To Talk About Kevin. Flashbacks are typically employed to provide clarity, but not by Ramsay. Every glimpse of a potential explanation offers an equal amount of ambiguity.
You Were Never Really Here never grants the violent satisfaction that audiences expect from a revenge thriller. In the film’s most striking scene, and the closest Ramsay has ever come to an action set piece, Joe’s infiltration of a brothel plays out across disjointed CCTV footage. There’s nothing balletic about his attacks. We want to cheer the murder of child abusers, but Ramsay never makes it so simple. Instead, she shows brutal flashes of violence, then the cold, almost mundane sight of corpses in the corridor. In one moment, a little girl leaves a room and quietly walks past the body of the man who presumably raped her. There’s nothing cathartic for her in this.
Grace’s sprint towards danger in Die My Love parallels Joe’s casual approach to his own mortality. He smothers himself with a plastic bag and plays with knives, not to actually kill himself but to capture some of that suicidal sensation. Grace, too, plays around with knives, throws herself through a glass door, and attempts to leap from a moving car. And yet, even amid this, both films do have real moments of humor, albeit as dark as a bottomless pit. Grace indulges in inappropriate comments to get a rise out of the townsfolk, who have never embraced her. Joe comforts a dying man with a singalong of the Charlene ballad “I’ve Never Been To Me” (better known to moviegoers for its use in Priscilla Queen Of The Desert.)
These details show that it would be a mistake to think of Ramsay’s fascination with trauma as fatalistic. Unlike other provocateurs like Yorgos Lanthimos, she is not a filmmaker who sees oblivion as an apt conclusion for her characters or the world at large. Joe may casually dream of suicide, but he goes on living, and takes one of the surviving victims with him. Morvern can make a fresh start with “her” novel and the money it brings. Kevin admits his fear of life behind bars to his mother, an emotional breakthrough that leads to a parent-child reconciliation previously thought unthinkable. Ratcatcher‘s Joseph gets the chance of a new life in the countryside. His friend Kenny had hoped to save his pet mouse from the fate of the many rats plaguing the area, and we see the rodent’s victorious view of Earth from the shuttle of his red balloon. It’s a moment of pure magical realism, yes, but also of optimism for James and his community. Sometimes, miracles do happen when we’re at our lowest.
Even Grace’s ending, as startling and conclusive as it first seems, comes with a fable-like glimmer of hope. She burns her journal, the only work she’s managed to write since becoming a mother, and starts an all-consuming forest fire. After removing all of her clothes, she walks into the fire, a moment that her husband watches with a curious look of relief on his face. It’s a moment of liberation, albeit one as unforgiving as the life Grace has been living since her child was born. The end credits that soon follow feature a cover of Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” sung by Ramsay herself. A joke about Grace? The truth? Or just another Ramsay-esque way to articulate that which is impossible to explain through something more emotive? Trauma is destabilizing, but it’s not without meaning, and Ramsay’s ability to navigate it is where her true power as a filmmaker lies. Ramsay once explained that Joe’s arc in You Were Never Really Here is a “Lazarus story, about a guy who doesn’t want to exist, coming back to life in some way through trauma.” That’s the guiding force of her filmography: an all-consuming dip into emotional hell and back out again, told in as few words as possible. If she shows it, you’ll feel it.
