Jennifer Lawrence is “better than ever” in a hot portrait of maternity

Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson play in the “surreal” and “intense” study by Lynne Ramsay on the postpartum depression which was presented at the Cannes Festival.

We need to talk about Lynne Ramsay on Kevin is one of the hottest portraits of a woman’s cinema who does not go to maternity. And the new film by the extraordinary British director is almost an unofficial prequel. Adapted from Ariana Harwicz’s acclaimed novel of the same name, Die, My Love is a surreal, intense and sometimes dark exploration of postpartum depression – although it seems for a while because it will be much more and more.

Jennifer Lawrence is better than ever as a grace, a budding writer who moves from New York to the countryside with her partner Jackson, played by Robert Pattinson with a similar level of enthusiasm without vanity. The new life of the couple has the potential to be idyllic. They are fiercely in love, as shown in animal sex scenes, and their spacious house of platelets is surrounded by wood and meadows, so Grace will have peace and freedom to write a novel.

However, the skitteur of the rats in the opening scene is a warning that this dream house could become a nightmare, so it is not a surprise when, once the couple has a little boy, and Jackson begins to work far from the house several days a week, Grace is in softening by boredom, solitude and sexual frustration. Then when Jackson goes home with an unleashed and perpetually barrel dog, his situation becomes even more exasperating.

Die, my love should probably be shown to adolescents as a warning of how it can be repetitive, exasperating and alienated to take care of a baby. Ramsay makes the use of experts of countless techniques – detailed sound design, insistent music, mixed chronology, bizarre dream sequences – to transmit the feeling that grace becomes the drift of reality: it can be even more unstable than the traumatized protagonist of the latest film by Ramsay, you are really here.

What prevents the film from becoming too stressful to wear is that Lawrence is always difficult and dynamic, even at the lowest point of the character. She never begs us to sympathize with her. And the script can also be strongly funny. Jackson considers himself a support partner, but he is the kind of man who does not die out a noisy rock song during a heart conversation because, after all, “it’s a classic”. And the weariness and resentment of Grace pushed her to be deliciously sarcastic to one of the Folksy inhabitants who have the temerity of being kind to her.

In addition to building a disturbing American-Gothic atmosphere, the first half of the film contains all kinds of omens that Grace’s internal conflicts could soon be shocking outsourcing. His habit of crawling through the meadow tightening a big knife tower that dies, my love could become a slasher film. The motorcyclist who continues to roar in front of the house, his identity hidden by the visor tinged with his helmet, suggests that a home invasion thriller is in sight. References to the suicide of the previous owner of the house implies that the film could be a supernatural cooler on a cursed haunted house. And then there is the recently widowed mother of Jackson, Pam (Sissy Spacek), who took the sleep along the road that leads from her house, not far, wearing a loaded rifle. The sequences shared by her and Grace ensure that the experience of adaptation to a birth is reflected by the experience of adapting to a death. These sequences also promise that a kind of violent confrontation is only a matter of time.

It is then disappointing, that none of these different Doom strikers turns into a scenario. The film has its share of incidents, but it is essentially a piece of mood – a long nervous breakdown – rather than a drama with a plot. And because the subsequent scenes continue to repeat the parental theme-that is to say which was so clear at the beginning, dies, my love becomes exhausting long before it drifts in the end credits. Ramsay’s films flair illuminates the scene after the scene, but like the narrative fragments, and the reality and the fantasy are blurred, you still have the desire to read the novel to discover what is really going on. The film may have communicated the boredom and perplexity of its heroine a little too effectively.