In 'Die My Love,' Motherhood Is A Mad Mad Mad World | Defector

"In 1974, John Cassavetes released A Woman Under the Influence, starring Gena Rowlands as a mother going through a mental breakdown. I can't imagine that people at the time were ready for such an unflinching look at psychological collapse, particularly from a woman who is expected to be both loving mother and dutiful wife. Fifty years later, that movie is now recognized as a masterpiece, but we are not much better equipped to deal with that particular strain of maternal or relational madness."

"It's one of the preoccupations of the movies recently, depicted in films like If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, Nightbitch, and the forthcoming The Bride, an update of Bride of Frankenstein. This also includes Die My Love, the latest film by surrealist filmmaker Lynne Ramsey, in which Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson play a young couple that has moved into a farmhouse in the Montana woods after having their first child."

"Both movies are experiential dream-horrors about mothers and the psychosis of motherhood. The big difference is that Die My Love even further prioritizes experience over narrative. Lawrence's Grace is a new mother with clear postpartum mental-health issues to go with some other unspecified problems, and the movie follows her through her full descent into the hell of the mind. How much you enjoy Lawrence as a performer will largely determine how you feel about this movie."

A Woman Under the Influence initiated a lineage of films portraying maternal psychological collapse, and contemporary cinema continues that preoccupation. Recent titles include If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, Nightbitch, The Bride, and Die My Love, which relocates a new family to a Montana farmhouse. Die My Love echoes We Need To Talk About Kevin, using dream-horror techniques to render motherhood psychosis as interior, experiential terror. The film privileges sensory immersion over clear narrative, following Grace, a new mother with postpartum mental-health struggles, and relies heavily on Jennifer Lawrence's performance to carry the audience through the descent.

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