Lynne Ramsay

Die, My Love

16/11/25

Filmhouse, Edinburgh

Die, My Love, based on Ariana Harwicz’s acclaimed novel, is another irresistible movie from Scottish director, Lynne Ramsay. With a script by Ramsay, Enda Walsh and Alice Birch, this unflinching study of a woman’s postpartum psychological breakdown is as compelling as it is harrowing – and Jennifer Lawrence is frankly wonderful in the lead role.

Grace (Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson) are expecting their first baby and, in preparation for this new chapter of their lives, they move into Jackson’s deceased uncle’s house. They’re not fazed by the piles of leaves in every room, the old-fashioned decor or even a minor rat infestation: they’re young, excited and in love. They’ll make it work.

But once Grace gives birth to Harry, the spark between her and Jackson dies. She’s stuck at home: bored, resentful and unable to cope. Jackson’s job means that he can escape from the oppressive confines of their isolated house, but Grace’s work is writing; it doesn’t get her out and she can’t focus on it anyway. “I don’t do that any more,” she says.

She loves her baby but she feels trapped and abandoned. Jackson never wants to have sex with her any more, although the box of condoms in his car seems to be getting lighter by the week. She refuses to be just Harry’s mother: why can’t she also still be Grace-the-writer, Grace-and-Jackson, Grace-the-wild, the-impulsive, the-let’s-have-fun? With only Jackson’s bereaved mother, Pam (the fabulous Sissy Spacek), for company, Grace’s mental health begins to deteriorate, her behaviour becoming ever more erratic and dangerous.

Ramsay’s film is undoubtedly dark, but it’s bleakly funny too. Grace’s blunt responses to the platitudes she’s offered often fall into the “things-we-all-wish-we-could-say-but-can’t” category, and – if it weren’t for all the damage they cause – her devil-may-care actions are almost inspirational. I feel sorry for both Grace and Jackson, a couple trapped in a relationship that no longer works, dragging each other down in their attempts to meet society’s expectations of them. “Let’s get married,” says Jackson in desperation. Maybe a wedding is the glue they need to stick them back together?

Or maybe not…

More than anything, this movie reminds me of Charlotte Perkins-Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper; indeed, there are several overt references here to the 19th century short story, not least in Grace’s frantic stripping of the heavily-patterned wallpaper with her fingernails, or her crawling through the long grass just like Perkin-Gilman’s “creeping woman”. It’s not just the remote house and the remote husband, nor even the medicalisation of female emotions or the retreat into a fantasy world. More than any of that, it’s the mind-numbing boredom of the protagonist’s existence, and her refusal to accept this as her lot.

A real contender for my film of the year, Die, My Love is a bravura piece of movie-making: stark, beautiful and as uncompromising as its heroine.

5 stars

Susan Singfield

You Were Never Really Here

10/03/18

There’s plenty to admire in You Were Never Really Here. Lynne Ramsay’s edgy, coiled-spring of an action movie, based on a novella by Jonathan Ames, is deeply unsettling, even if I can’t help drawing comparisons with an even better film, Taxi Driver, with which it shares a central premise.

Ramsay’s take on the idea is a much more fragmentary affair than Martin Scorcese’s 1976 masterpiece, flickering eerily in and out of past trauma and often showing us images that turn out to be no more than sick fantasies in the head of the central character.

That character is Joe (Joaquin Phoenix),  a shambling, bearlike presence in this film, muttering in monosyllables and wandering morosely from scene to scene as he metes out grim retribution to those he believes are beyond saving. He’s a traumatised ex-soldier and former FBI agent, who now earns a crust  tracking down missing girls – and sadly there seems to be no shortage of them in the cities of America. In his down time, Joe cares for his aging mother (Judith Roberts), with whom he shares a touching, almost childlike bond.

Joe has a healthy paranoia about being seen by others (hence the title) and always does his level best to stay off the radar. His services are enlisted by Senator Albert Votto (Alex Manette), whose teenage daughter, Nina (Ekaterina Samsonov) has been kidnapped by a well-connected paedophile. She is being held hostage in a city hotel room, so Joe goes in to rescue her, armed with his favourite weapon, a ball-peen hammer. But he soon comes to fully appreciate just how powerful Nina’s kidnapper is – and it isn’t long before he has become a target for the man’s deadly enforcers.

This is an uncompromisingly brutal film, the many scenes of violence somehow made even more affecting by the fact that we glimpse them from a distance, or through the impassive monochrome gaze of a hotel’s security cameras. The action is liberally crosscut with harrowing memories of Joe’s troubled childhood, when he and his mother were regularly terrorised by Joe’s abusive father. It soon becomes apparent that what Joe is seeking more than anything else is some kind of redemption for his own suffering.

This is not an easy film to watch, but it’s nonetheless mesmerising. Phoenix is utterly convincing in the central role, there’s a bruising score by Johnny Greenwood, and Ramsay directs with a confident, almost hallucinatory style, never over-explaining the story, allowing her viewers to reach their own conclusions through the barrage of conflicting images she immerses them in.

It’s a powerful brew, not for the faint-hearted.

4.5 stars

Philip Caveney