‘Die My Love’ review: Jennifer Lawrence in a mother of a role

Its story may revolve around Grace, but “Die My Love” revolves around Jennifer Lawrence, for whom this feels like a career-defining role — not that she really required one.

By ALISSA WILKINSON

A description is insufficient to describe some movies, and “Die My Love,” directed by Lynne Ramsay, is one of them. A young couple, Grace and Jackson, move to a house in the woods. They have a baby, and in the midst of fierce postpartum depression, Grace starts to lose her grasp on reality — or, some might argue, regain it. That’s the plot.

But you might as well describe Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” as “just some guy screaming”: not wrong, exactly, but totally missing the point. “Die My Love” is linear yet allusive; sometimes you’re not sure how much time has passed, and sometimes it passes in a blink. Submerged in Grace’s overheated, claustrophobic, tedious, maddening reality, we are drowning, just like her. It is full-body-immersion cinema.

Its story may revolve around Grace, but “Die My Love” revolves around Jennifer Lawrence, for whom this feels like a career-defining role — not that she really required one. Lawrence has been a force for 15 years, but she dropped out of sight for a while and has been testing her range lately, first with the beautifully understated drama “Causeway” and then the bouncier sex comedy “No Hard Feelings.”

“Die My Love” is something else altogether. You’ve seen woman-on-the-verge roles; you’ve even seen Lawrence in them. (There’s one scene in particular in “Die My Love” that recalled “Mother!” just for a second, and I had to chuckle.) But those movies tend to make us observers of a sane woman going crazy. It’s true that this movie makes us wonder early on if Grace is seeing things — the biker (LaKeith Stanfield), for instance, who keeps speeding past the house. But in this case, Grace is already a live wire when we meet her. She’s like the earth and fire elements got stirred together and molded into a woman. You can almost believe she’d be kind of erratic whether or not her hormones were raging. She’s neither sane nor crazy: She’s just Grace, and that’s what she’s like.

That is why Jackson fell in love with her — he’s a weirdo, too — and why he defends her for so long, even after her behavior starts to draw notice from his family. That’s also why Robert Pattinson is perfect in the role, and an ideal foil for Lawrence. They’re both instinctive, intuitive actors. But Lawrence is raw and naturalistic and expressive, while Pattinson is wiry and restrained and more reactive. You can see exactly why their characters, two artists with a romantic idea about making art in the woods, fell for each other, and exactly why they’d drive each other crazy: They’re like opposing elements, earth and fire trying to meld with air and water. This house in the woods is no place for these people to live, but Jackson grew up nearby. Grace might as well be an alien.

Some themes running through “Die My Love” are more suggested than outright indicated: Grace’s fondness for pretending to be an animal stalking her prey, for instance, and the notion that madness haunts these woods, or maybe just this house. And there’s Jackson’s mother, Pam (Sissy Spacek, in an excellent performance), who lives around the corner, in the house that Jackson grew up in. She has also recently lost her husband, Harry (Nick Nolte). Her own sudden slipping grip on reality is like another pole for Grace’s struggle, with the two of them wandering in the moonlit night, time and reality turned upside down.

Grace looks, at times, as if she’s in a movie from a different era; in fact, for long stretches, it’s not completely clear what year it is, which adds to the film’s dreaminess. She wears filmy nightgowns and underwear, and at times her long blonde hair is styled in a way that made me wonder if it was meant to evoke Catherine Deneuve in “Repulsion,” or maybe Brigitte Bardot. Lawrence began shooting the film when she was 4 1/2 months pregnant with her second child, which is remarkable enough on its face, but the sheer physicality of the role makes it even more so. Grace is sexual and violent and gentle and maternal and savage; she rips wallpaper and sits in her refrigerator and screams and cracks jokes at the baby. Tour de force is an overused cliche, but it was meant for roles like this.

Although almost the entire creative team is made up of women, the seed for “Die My Love” originated with — oddly enough — Martin Scorsese, who read Ariana Harwicz’s 2012 novel in his book club in 2020, sent it along to the production company that Lawrence runs with Justine Ciarrocchi, and said he could see Lawrence in the lead role. They brought on Ramsay, who wrote the adaptation with Enda Walsh and Alice Birch, the seasoned playwrights and screenwriters.

The result, in the end, is the kind of movie that polarizes. It’s hard to imagine feeling middling about it, and some will find it infuriating. But I loved it the first time I saw it and loved it more the second, not only because it takes a huge swing and connects but also because this is the role I’ve been wanting to see Lawrence play since I first saw her in “Winter’s Bone” all those years ago. Watching someone go for broke and actually make it is exhilarating. And when a movie leaves me feeling as if I just swam across rapids and barely dragged myself out alive — well, that’s why I go to the movies.

‘Die My Love’

Rated R for sex, violence, swearing and hints of child endangerment (he’s fine) and dog endangerment (he’s not). Running time: 1 hour, 58 minutes. In theaters.