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If you haven\u2019t lived it, it\u2019s hard to explain, that gnawing discomfort that makes you want to do something certified-capital-C loony-bin-admission Crazy. Walk into traffic or throw your body down the stairs or slash up your skin with a razor blade or bite one of your fingers off like a baby carrot. It\u2019s like<\/em> a lot of things. Like bugs playing house under your skin. Like the hum of television static after programming stops for the night. Like going out of your fucking mind. Times used to be that they\u2019d just call you hysterical and throw you in an institution indefinitely; maybe try electroconvulsive therapy or a lobotomy to make you more agreeable. (I joke about lobotomies a lot with my other mentally ill friends. I guess the idea of removing a part of my brain to make me a little easier to manage is pretty funny, like that old Wanda Sykes gag about the detachable pussy.)<\/p>\n So here are Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson), transplants from New York who take on the ruin of his uncle\u2019s old prairie home after he shot himself. He\u2019s a musician, she\u2019s a writer. They\u2019re truly, madly, deeply in love, and soon enough baby makes three: a sweet, chubby-cheeked little poppet who gurgles and cries and babbles and does all the things babies do. Jackson goes back out to work, then brings home a dog that barks constantly and pisses on the floor. Grace plays with the baby and dances in her underwear and masturbates and drinks from sweating bottles of Budweiser in the summer heat. And Grace goes out of her fucking mind.<\/p>\n Ariana Harwicz\u2019s novel \u2018Die, My Love\u2019 is a stream-of-consciousness assault on the senses; a nameless woman lives with her husband and baby and in-laws in a rural French farmhouse, and retains a tenuous grasp on reality. Her thoughts are violent and tragic and animal \u2013 she fantasises about a neighbour with a motorbike, about the creatures in the forest, about killing and being killed. It\u2019s easy to understand why a filmmaker like Lynne Ramsay might be interested in adapting a text as wilfully offputting, as tragic and complex and feral as \u2018Die, My Love\u2019. And this filmable script \u2013 co-written with Enda Walsh and Alice Birch \u2013 doesn\u2019t always work, certainly not with the same heft of Morvern Callar<\/em> or You Were Never Really Here<\/em>, frenetic and disjointed with lots of wriggling tendrils and not much interest in exploring more than a handful of them. (LaKeith Stanfield gets short shrift as Grace\u2019s mysterious biker neighbour.)<\/p>\n But the cinema of Lynne Ramsay is cinema of the senses, raw and delicate and alive, like holding a butterfly cupped between your palms and feeling its wings beat against your skin. Jennifer Lawrence completely understands this, inhibiting Grace with a total lack of vanity as she crawls on all fours, as she violently wrecks a small bathroom, as she tries to come back into commune with her body after something as destabilising as bringing another person into the world. She\u2019s never been better, vulnerable and terrible and totally unpredictable, matched gamely by the always compelling Robert Pattinson, utilised as a wet, sweaty, semi-useless man completely ill-suited for Grace\u2019s needs. But a classic Wife vs Husband meltdown \u00e0 la Scenes from a Marriage\u00a0<\/em>or\u00a0Possession<\/em> would be too tempting and familiar; the heart of Die, My Love<\/em> is that Grace and Jackson do<\/em> love each other, do<\/em> want each other, underscored by the use of John Prine and Iris DeMent\u2019s country classic \u2018In Spite Of Ourselves\u2019. Their romance is one of pushing and pulling, a dance you don\u2019t learn the steps to so much as feel in the geography of your bones. And sometimes you go where the other can\u2019t follow. Love is its own sort of psychosis.<\/p>\n While much will be made of Die, My Love<\/em>\u2019s gut-wrenching portrayal of postnatal mental illness, a little-studied and even littler-understood condition that makes witches out of women, the experience Ramsay captures in Grace\u2019s story isn\u2019t unique to those who have children or are ill in the aftermath of their birth. Psychosis is much bigger, much stranger and vicious, and while Grace is a new mother, her illness isn\u2019t solely attributed to her son\u2019s arrival. She adores him, even if she looks at him like he\u2019s an alien. And how then, if you are<\/em> psychotic, can you divorce your illness from your art? Grace\u2019s husband, her mother-in-law and her well-meaning neighbours all keep asking how her writing is going. Grace tells them she\u2019s quit. It\u2019s less trouble than trying to explain blood comes easier than ink.<\/p>\n Ramsay articulates the inarticulate, here through her saturated blues, yellows, browns and greens, the colours of grief and sickness and rot\u2026but also new life, summer skies, and hope. The Academy ratio is an homage to Repulsion<\/em> and Rosemary\u2019s Baby <\/em>that gives the sensation of being boxed in (of climbing up the walls) and Seamus McGarvey\u2019s cinematography renders the beautiful terrible and vice versa.\u00a0 Ramsay also contributes music to the film\u2019s noisy, messy, intentionally untethered score, including the exquisite cover of Joy Division\u2019s \u2018Love Will Tear Us Apart\u2019 that plays over the film\u2019s credits \u2013 but Die, My Love<\/em> isn\u2019t a eulogy. It\u2019s a forest fire, destructive, angry, hotter than hell. And when it burns out, something new springs out from the ground.<\/p>\n To keep celebrating the craft of film, we have to rely on the support of our members. Join Club LWLies today and receive access to a host of benefits.<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nGet more Little White Lies<\/h3>\n<\/p><\/div>\n