Producers: Andrea Calderwood, Jennifer Lawrence, Justine Ciarrocchi, Martin Scorsese, Thad Luckinbill, Trent Luckinbill and Molly Smith   Director: Lynne Ramsay   Screenplay: Enda Walsh, Lynne Ramsay and Alice Burch   Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Pattinson, Sissy Spacek, Nick Nolte, LaKeith Stanfield, Kennedy and Victoria Calderwood, Gabrielle Rose, Debs Howard, Sarah Lind, Marcus Della Rosa and Saylor McPherson   Distributor: MUBI

Grade: C

Raw and uncompromising are words that admirers will undoubtedly use in referring to the latest film by writer-director Lynne Ramsay, an adaptation of Ariana Harwicz’s 2012 novel “Matate, amor.”  The film shifts the locale from Provence to Montana, but retains the book’s intense focus on its protagonist, here called Grace, a new wife and mother unravelling under the stress of postpartum depression and an unhappy marriage.

But while the book could take one inside the woman’s head, conveying her emotions in laceratingly direct language, the film is necessarily observational, leaving it to Jennifer Lawrence to embody her deterioration, the easy route of voiceover happily having been rejected.  And the actress, to be sure, takes on the job with ferocity; she spares nothing in depicting Grace’s emotional unravelling.  She is the film: Robert Pattinson, as Grace’s wimpy husband Jackson, Sissy Spacek as her concerned, recently widowed mother-in-law Pam, Nick Nolte as Pam’s dementia-ridden husband Harry, LaKeith Stanfield as Karl, the motorcyclist Grace fantasizes about, even Kennedy and Victoria Calderwood as her infant boy Harry (named, presumably, after his dotty granddad), are little more than props serving her virtuoso turn.

So we watch in horror as Grace crawls through the woods surrounding the couple’s decrepit wooden home (a place rendered with bleak realism by production designer Tim Grimes)—which they’ve been given after its owner, Jackson’s Uncle Frank, committed suicide by shooting himself in a most unusual way—with kitchen knife in hand, snarling at the world, or crashing through a sliding glass door, or abruptly stripping off her dress to jump into a pool of kids at a family gathering in her underwear, or contemptuously berating a cashier (Saylor McPherson) at a grocery store when the girl has the temerity to ooh and ah over the baby.  Jackson is simply bewildered by the long descent, fueled by her suspicions that he’s having an affair while off on the road for his job (at one point he calls home while having lunch in Nampa, Idaho), while Pam, herself shell-shocked by Harry’s death, dismisses it as something to be expected, to some extent at least, as a normal experience for any new mother.

And how does Ramsay contribute to Lawrence’s thespian tour de force?  She and her collaborators—cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, editor Toni Froschammer and Grimes—create a visual environment that’s crushingly claustrophobic even in the exteriors.  The very fact that the film is shot in the boxy 4:3 Academy ratio with camerawork that’s intensely close-up, fosters a feeling of oppression in viewers as well as in Grace.

But Ramsay further emphasizes the almost suffocating feel by her staging choices.  The couple’s arrival at their new home, for example, is shot from a single static viewpoint, and they move in and out of the image, together or singly, before collapsing on the floor in rabid embrace.  Other visual strategies compound the effect.

Equally important is the film’s sound world, fashioned by composers George Vjestica, Raife Burchell and Ramsay herself, music supervisors Burchell and Ian Neil and sound designer Tim Burns.  Jackson occasionally takes up a guitar, and talks early on of using a room in the house as a recording studio, but there’s no indication that he’s a serious musician; instead he simply plays music at incredibly loud volume both at home and in the car.  To make matters worse, he brings home a dog that barks incessantly, which adds to the din of the baby’s crying—and Grace is advised that the infant’s wailing is natural and shouldn’t be too carefully attended to.  She’s trapped by sound as well as space, and one is constantly disturbed by the thought that in her madness she might harm her child, though in the event it’s the dog for which one should be more concerned. 

The result is that, though Jackson mentions her wanting to write the Great American Novel, Grace is unable to put pen to paper.  Not that the film manages to portray her as a real writer any more than it does Jackson as a real composer, or them both as former New Yorkers—which an elliptical comment by Jackson suggests at one point.  And the allusions to attempts to help Grace in response to her self-destructive impulses—a hospital stay after that encounter with the glass door, a remark that Jackson had “committed” her, along with a scene of conversation with a therapist that indicates her unhappy childhood—are so brief and off-handed that they barely register.

To add to our uncertainty, Ramsay plays with chronology, apparently skipping back and forth in time while including what are presumably flashbacks and hallucinations.  At one point, for example, we’re shown the couple’s wedding celebration, an event in which raucousness and affection play equal roles.  But it’s unclear whether this is a recollection of happier times, or is occurring in the midst of Grace’s slide into mental disturbance, perhaps as a part of a plan by Jackson to assure her of his fidelity.  Such directorial tactics leave us as disoriented as Grace.

All of which points to the refusal of “Die My Love” to become an explanatory psychological portrait.  Rather it’s a brutal fever dream of a woman’s descent into emotional chaos, marked by the astonishing physicality of Lawrence’s performance.  But the focus, visual as well as dramatic, is so limited that everything around her pales into insignificance, or inexplicability (which amounts to the same thing).  Like Ramsay’s previous pictures, it’s white-hot—the narrative in this case appropriately bookended by scenes set in a forest fire—but the flames it generates are cold and distant, aiming for the head rather than the heart, and in the end leaving one unsettled but unmoved.