Cannes isn’t Cannes without its big, bold misses. Last year’s edition had them in spades: Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez, Paolo Sorrentino’s Parthenope, and David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, to name but a few. This year, I’m sorry to report that one of them is Lynne Ramsay’s breathlessly awaited Die My Love, a searing drama about a woman in the midst of a spectacular breakdown, which stars none other than Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Pattinson, Sissy Spacek, and LaKeith Stanfield. Given Ramsay’s distinctive, highly respected oeuvre—Ratcatcher, We Need to Talk About Kevin, You Were Never Really Here—and the caliber of these movie stars, on paper this seemed to be a prospective Palme d’Or frontrunner, before going onto Oscar glory. In reality, it isn’t and shouldn’t be.
We meet our two gorgeous leads, Grace (Lawrence) and Jackson (Pattinson), in the dilapidated farmhouse they now occupy. Two former New Yorkers with creative ambitions—she, to write a great American novel; he, to record an album—they have inherited it from Jackson’s uncle, who recently passed away, and intend to put all of this new space to good use. They do—but not in the way they expected to. An electric, head-spinning montage zips us forward in time, as they dance together with reckless abandon and have desperate, hungry sex on the floor. Soon, Grace is pregnant, and then their son, Harry, is six months old, as she wonders what happened to them. Now, their previously wild, open, and limitless lives revolve around the baby, and they have begun to drift apart.
As that union erodes, Grace visits the distressed Pam (Spacek), Jackson’s mother, who lives nearby and, since her own husband’s death, can most often be found sleepwalking down a local highway, rifle in hand. Grace also develops a strange obsession with a biker (Stanfield) who stalks their house. Oh, and she’s pushed further to the edge when Jackson brings home an excitable puppy, who barks all night while the baby cries and he continues to sleep soundly.
The conditions are in place for an explosive downward spiral: there are infidelities, followed by an attempt at reconciliation, and then everything goes awry once again in epic fashion.
Through it all, though, there’s no real method to the madness. Grace and Jackson scream and shout—that’s the pitch their relationship begins at, and it largely stays that way—but we’re often unsure exactly why, beyond a vague awareness of the parental and martial responsibilities that weigh on them. Their relationship, despite being the heart and soul of Die My Love, lacks any actual complexity on the page, and as individuals they’re not fully believable, either. Perhaps because of this, I felt even more acutely aware of the fact that they’re supposed to be tired, depressed, down-on-their-luck new parents, but still look like the stunningly beautiful Dior ambassadors they actually are.
Lawrence doesn’t, however, let this stop her from having the time of her life. She crawls through the tall grass with the prowess of a deadly cheetah, barks ferociously at Jackson’s dog, randomly crashes through windows, drags her nails down walls until they bleed, and, in one scene, ends a late-night feed with her baby by absent-mindedly painting with her breastmilk.
These big, bombastic performances have long been the Oscar winner’s calling card, from David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle to Darren Aronofsky’s Mother!, and she seems totally at home as a destructive whirlwind consuming everything in her path—though in her quieter moments, I found myself increasingly baffled by her motivations.
Several critics at Cannes have already labeled her as one to watch ahead of the 2026 Oscars, and if an effective comeback narrative is constructed (it’s been a staggering 12 years since her Academy Award win and a decade since her last nomination), then I could certainly see it—despite its outlandishness, her turn is pure Oscar bait. However, considering Babygirl’s Nicole Kidman recently missed out for a similarly out-there portrayal, also with copious amounts of casual nudity, it’s certainly not guaranteed, either.
Elsewhere, Spacek is an entertaining presence, too, and Pattinson is wholly committed, but both, like Lawrence, are let down by a script—a loose adaptation of Ariana Harwicz’s novel of the same name, by Ramsay, renowned playwright Enda Walsh, and Conversations with Friends’ Alice Birch—which gestures at trauma without digging its claws into it. The editing is frantic and the images that flash across the screen arresting, but none of this can distract from the fundamental lack of substance.
It’s a lot of empty provocation; a frantic throwing of things at the wall; much sound and fury signifying nothing, which ends up akin to the much more self-serious and arthouse Nightbitch, Marielle Heller’s equally flawed, Amy Adams-led portrait of a mother’s unravelling. In truth, we need many more onscreen depictions of the turbulence and unspoken horrors of motherhood, but Die My Love—a two-hour marathon which sent countless people at my evening Cannes screening to sleep, a real feat for a film this shouty—unfortunately, just isn’t it.
This story was originally published on Vogue.com.
