Jennifer Lawrence gives everything to Die My Love
Lynne Ramsay’s latest film delivers a riveting adaptation of an intense narrative about emotional collapse. It channels the raw edge of Ariana Harwicz’s debut novel, first published in 2012, capturing the chaos of a woman on the brink.
“How valuable they are depends on how highly we rank the expression of experience with which we can in no sense identify, and from which we can only turn with shock and sorrow.”
— Philip Larkin, reviewing Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems
Much like the shock Larkin describes, Die, My Love jolts its audience. The story’s unnamed narrator embodies fury, dissatisfaction, and the aching void of isolation. A foreigner in rural France, she struggles as a stalled writer and reluctant mother, overwhelmed by new responsibilities and alien surroundings.
Disgusted with her husband’s indifference and entangled in an affair with a married neighbour, she teeters between desire and contempt. Her words burn with desperation:
“A breath of irrationality had set fire to my existence.”
After a period in hospital, her calm is fragile. At her son’s second birthday, she unravels completely:
“I hope you all die, every last one of you… Just die, my love.”
The diagnosis of postpartum psychosis barely contains the story’s power. Even compared to the recent surge of artistic works exploring motherhood’s darker edges, Die, My Love stands as a strikingly relentless vision of mental fracture and rage.
Author’s Summary
A haunting portrayal of a woman’s unraveling mind, Ramsay’s film binds Harwicz’s fierce prose into a visceral study of motherhood, isolation, and suppressed fury.