Big Picture Big Sound

Something feels entirely ominous about the first moments of Lynne Ramsay's "Die My Love." The camera holds still at a wide shot of the inside of a house, and the characters take a few minutes to enter the home. They are Grace (Jennife Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson), a couple who inherited the home from Jackson's late uncle. What feels like a fresh start for the couple turns out to be the beginning of an unravelling in the unsettling and perplexing - but wholly hypnotic - new film from Ramsay.

"Die My Love," which is adapted by Ramsay, Enda Walsh, and Alice Birch from Ariana Harwicz's novel, will be polarizing without going through great strains to do so. Throughout the movie, which follows the postpartum mental challenges of Lawrence's character, Ramsay plays with her audience's perception of reality, which allows insight into what Grace is going through. It can be a frustrating movie, at times, but that's because it's tackling a topic that isn't easy to understand without lived experience.

Mary Bronstein's "If I Had Legs I'd Kick You," which came out last month, portrayed Rose Byrne's character as a mother whose path to motherhood felt taken without being fully desired. There have been plenty of comparisons already between "Die My Love" and "If I Had Legs I'd Kick You," two movies in conversation with each other that aren't operating in the same mode.

In the wake of her marriage and the eventual birth of her baby, Grace's mental health and behavior begin to decline and become increasingly erratic. Unlike Byrne's character in "If I Had Legs I'd Kick You," the child isn't the source of Grace's angst; it's her partner. While she's home all day he works, and when he gets home, he doesn't show much interest in spending time with Grace or their child (but manages to bring an overly zealous puppy home - imagine how that goes over with Grace). Grace is trying to recapture her sexual appetite from when they were first dating, but Jackson rarely shows interest. This is where a romantic interest in a mysterious neighbor (LaKeith Stanfield, who feels ultimately wasted and underused here) comes into play.

"Die My Life" feels like a fever dream, and as captured by cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, it looks like one on screen. He shoots Grace and Jackson's secluded home as a quiet oasis with an eerily calm setting, juxtaposed against what is happening inside the house. It creates a subtle, but uneasy, tension throughout the movie, like waiting for a powder keg to go off.

But the powder keg that's hard to ignore is Lawrence and her performance as Grace. Throughout the press tour leading up to the release of the movie, Lawrence has talked about knowing that the public was likely sick of seeing her in so many movies (she dominated screens in the 2010s, largely thanks to the "Hunger Games" franchise). Like most movie stars, there is a lull once they reach the peak of their success, which can sometimes be a good thing. In the little-seen 2022 movie "Causeway" and now "Die My Love," Lawrence has left the corporatized roles of "The Hunger Games" and "X-Men" behind and is doing some of her strongest work to date. Her performance as Grace is a howl to the moon announcing a new phase of her career.

Lawrence's pairing with Pattinson feels fated, as the two stars came up in Hollywood around the same time (Pattinson of "Twilight" fame, of course). Their chemistry together helps sell the evolution of this couple, opening the movie with primal sex on the floor of the kitchen and charting the deterioration into not understanding anything about each other as they progress through life. It takes two actors working in tandem with each other to make such progression believable on screen. Sissy Spacek gets some nice quiet moments as Jackson's mother, while Nick Nolte isn't required to do much as his father.

Ramsay's films are never put into the world with the expectation of finding a mass audience. From her early work ("Ratcatcher" and "Morvern Callar") to movies that found larger attention on the film festival or awards circuit ("We Need to Talk About Kevin" and "You Were Never Really Here"), Ramsay's movies require an audience to be willing to give themselves over to her wavelength. "Die My Love" might be alienating to some, but it dares you to look away. You won't be able to.