Flasz On Film

I thought for a little bit whether these thoughts stirring inside me were supposed to be downloaded into a journal page and committed to the drawer, or here. Maybe I’m not in the best frame of mind to be doing this—and maybe I wasn’t in the best frame of mind to be watching Die My Love in the first place—but I here I am. Doing this. Because I did. I did watch it. And the reason I’m here is because Die My Love left an acrid taste in my mouth and I need to wipe my tongue into something, so it might as well be the keyboard.

As the title of whatever this is going to be suggests, I have problems with Die My Love. Which is not a predicament I expected to find myself in because I like Lynne Ramsay’s filmmaking. In many ways, this movie extends her career-spanning interest in telling stories about women in crisis (Morvern Callar, We Need to Talk About Kevin), as she has proven time and again to have a knack for installing the viewer just behind the eyes of her protagonists and allowing them to experience what it possibly could be like to walk a mile in their shoes.

Die My Love is no different here. This is a detailed character study that takes a close look at what a slowly gestating mental illness might look like, especially in women suffering from postpartum depression. Contrary to many critics of the film whose main gripe with it was that underneath stylistic flourishes and inspired visuals—both of which work in service of that viewer transportation and building a fragile link between the main character’s mental state and the viewer’s emotional response—there wasn’t much for the film to explore, what bothers me was slightly different.

Maybe this is a mistake on my part because as a “critic” you ought to apparently be able to detach your own experience and biases from the film and examine it on its own terms, but this is unfortunately how things shake down. Because I do have first-hand experience of both having lived through mental health crises and bearing witness to someone going through something tangential to what Jennifer Lawrence’s Grace was experiencing in the film, Die My Love gained a frighteningly personal dimension for me… which in turn gave me the perspective to look past the main character and notice a handful of squandered opportunities for a better-rounded character commentary that the filmmaker missed.

Granted, this already looks as though I was reviewing a movie I wished I had seen instead of the one I actually watched, but I don’t care. I believe this is important enough to bring up because it does pertain to the story the movie weaves—even if it is fundamentally sparse and almost completely reliant on character-led progression instead of straightforward plotting. What Ramsay (supported by Enda Walsh and Alice Birch who share with her the screenwriting credit) clearly focused on was Grace’s experience of losing her mind, which does present a unique and rarely explored (and even rarer when explored with sufficient nuance) set of thematic ideas wholly ensconced in teasing out how a human mind experiences its own sundering. In different contexts we have seen something like this in The Father, I’m Thinking of Ending Things or mother! What sets Die My Love apart is predominantly the fact that Ramsay chooses to purposefully confuse and discombobulate the viewer alongside the protagonist, as she inserts hallucinations without signposting them even in the most subtle manner, manipulates the narrative timeline, casually rewinds and replays elements of the narrative and eventually rubs supernatural elements and hallucinatory visions into the fabric of reality itself. This is all commendable and worthwhile, and it is a mistake to fault the filmmaker for these decisions.

However, at the same time the movie does tell a story that extends beyond Grace’s perspective and impacts on other characters in the narrative. Even though her predicament makes her feel alone and abandoned, Grace is not left on her own in the movie. Her partner Jackson (Robert Pattinson) is right there with her, trying to make sense of what’s happening. Their little baby is stuck in this nightmare too, completely void of its own agency. Which is where I am opening myself to accusations of critiquing a film I didn’t watch—even though my contention is that this is the film I watched—because I choose to spare a few thoughts about the characters in this movie that Ramsay’s camera neglects.

And at least from where I am sitting it is obvious to me that not only Grace is not alone in this, her entire family suffers with her, though in different ways. Although the filmmaker does draw attention to certain aspects of how someone’s fractured mental state manifests to their partners—like in one scene where Grace berates Jackson for playing guitar music on the car radio as she admits to never having liked it in the first place, while on another occasion she requests that music because she says she has always loved it—that slowly and methodically undermine perception of reality in both Grace and Jackson, it is incredibly easy to miss this nuance. After all, the camera and the attention always reverts to following Grace’s descent into madness while leaving only vestigial threads of a broader conversation about the unimaginable horror that encompasses both suffering from a mental condition and living with someone who does.

This is something that is not only poorly described but extremely rarely explored in storytelling in sufficient nuance that denudes the tension between a person who does not necessarily realize what’s happening to her and someone who at first has no idea what’s going on and then fails completely at convincing the other person that they need to seek professional help. Imagine having to explain to someone who has suffered a compound fracture but openly disagrees with facts and questions the severity of your assertion, that they need urgent medical attention. This just doesn’t happen because if something happens to our bodies, all we need is the evidence of our eyes and the sensory feedback coming to our brains in the form of a pain response. When the mind is failing us, though, it becomes nearly impossible because you can’t convince someone that the “reality” they experience is peppered with hallucinations or modulated with misfired emotional responses, and hence might be orthogonal to what’s actually real. As far as Grace is concerned, her visions are as real as her emotional anguish, even though the truth might be more complex. And as the movie itself suggests, finding a way out of this problem is incredibly difficult. In this case—tragically impossible.

What is even more worrisome—and this is where I think the acrid aftertaste comes from—is that the movie refuses to engage with the part of the narrative it has introduced to give Grace’s character a sense of progression and purpose. Because it would be a wholly different experience if all we ever saw in Die My Love was just Grace losing her mind on her own, completely disengaged from the outside world, the story needs these other characters. And these characters matter. However, because the story leaves so much to one side, it leaves an open invitation to misinterpret events and even draw conclusions underpinned by a weird kind of subtle, latent misandry. Because so much of the story is delivered in the negative space between words and in seemingly throwaway, yet strategically positioned, lines of dialogue between Grace, Jackson and some other members of their extended family, it is left up to the viewer to infer a lot about how Grace found herself in this space and even apportion blame. Why was she left alone? Does her boyfriend not care? Who is accountable for this?

And this is where the movie chooses to make a statement. Some motivations and reasons underpinning Grace’s downward descent can be rationalized. They both decided to move to Montana because it did present itself as an opportunity of some sort, and then they both underestimated the toll it would take on both of them, and especially on Grace. This just happens. People make decisions like this and then realize, likely when it’s already too late, that this decision had a price that they both ended up having to pay; though, not equally. But Ramsay’s camera rarely challenges Grace’s obsessive remarks to an extent that would allow the viewer to make an unequivocal determination that what’s happening is clearly a result of her mental state being altered. Ambiguity lingers and thus allows both Grace and the viewer to develop a sense that Jackson might have been to blame for something. And that he is responsible for letting Grace’s mind fracture.

At the same time, we also observe Grace as she progressively develops homicidal tendencies, which are vindicated by the revelation that Jackson’s uncle—whose house they ended up inheriting—might not have committed suicide. Somewhere amid expressions of support towards Grace who is told by older women in the family that “going a little bit loopy” after having a baby is an experience they recognize, the filmmaker leaves an opening to infer that the uncle was murdered by his wife who may or may not have gone “loopy.” We just don’t know. But we know enough to suspect that the aunt killed him. We don’t know exactly why. We have no idea if it was self-defense, cold-blooded murder or a lapse of sanity. But we know that the story doesn’t care. A man died. So what?

Furthermore, because Grace is left thinking that the aunt might have killed him, it plants the seed of rationalization that is rooted in misandry, subtly expressed through neglect. Nobody cares about what happened to that man, just as nobody cares about what happens to Jackson and Harry, their baby. Ramsay seemingly wants us to see this movie as a story with only one protagonist, where in fact it has three. Thus, Die My Love veers dangerously close to normalizing implicitly assuming that in a situation where someone’s mind becomes afflicted with disease, there is blame to be apportioned between the partner and the sufferer. Or that it’s somehow OK to murder someone while rendered temporarily insane.

Maybe I’m making a mountain out of a molehill here, but these things matter. I would have loved for a movie that already strives to generate a nuanced look at a complex emotional problem to make more of an effort here. After all, I do not believe that all this film ever wanted to be was a platform for Jennifer Lawrence to give a great performance. Lynne Ramsay’s longstanding interest suggest that Die My Love wanted to be a detailed and inspired study. But somewhere in there, the storyteller either forgot or failed to acknowledge that undiagnosed postpartum depression affects more than one person and is perfectly capable of destroying entire families like a raging wildfire of completely unshackled emotions that it is.