Die My Love: Movie Review

Die My Love starts with a couple, Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson), living in a house in a very woodsy, somewhat isolated area where they eventually have a baby. The movie follows Grace and her experience in what seems to be postpartum depression. As she goes through this, she becomes increasingly annoyed and suspicious of her partner, Jackson, and ultimately just wants to be wanted and paid attention to by him. Jackson, meanwhile, is going through his own struggles trying to provide for his new family and dealing with Grace. Grace slowly starts to spiral because of her postpartum depression and starts to lash out at Jackson and herself. She starts to imagine herself with another man who lives in the same area, is shown scratching at walls, and is shown hurting herself to various degrees. Jackson and Grace end up getting married as a way to reignite what they once had. On her marriage night, Grace gets drunk and somewhat belligerent. She walks by herself to her hotel room, flirts with one of the hotel employees as she's asking for more wine, and smashes her head into the bathroom mirror. She wakes up, takes her baby, and starts to walk down the street toward her house. Jackson finds her and takes her to a hospital where she can get help. She is shown coming to terms with her past and eventually gets released from the hospital. Jackson and the baby pick her up in a new truck given by a friend, and take her home, where the house is now freshly painted and is clean and reorganized. They throw a welcome home party for Grace where she ends up running into the woods with Jackson following her. They sit down together and talk, and Grace says to Jackson, "Enough" and walks into the woods with Jackson staring after her. Grace takes out her diary, takes off her clothes, and lights the diary on fire. As the forest is set ablaze, Jackson tries to run after her, and Grace is shown walking into the fire. The final scene of the movie is back at the house with Grace, but the house is empty save for her and a cake she had just made. Grace looks around the empty house, walks out the front door, and the movie cuts to black.

Grace's postpartum depression, the audience quickly figures out, sets her up as an unreliable narrator. The movie is told from her focus, but there are multiple points throughout the movie that skip forward and backward through time as Grace goes through different experiences. There's a scene in the middle of the movie where she sees the man she imagines having an affair with and walks over and talks to him. Then, the movie jumps back to her and she is watching the man get in his car and leave as Jackson comes up to her. With this blatant showing of Grace's imagination, it leaves the audience guessing which other scenarios or experiences may not have actually happened as Grace portrays. Another example of this is at the end, where, initially, she is shown baking a cake with Jackson and the baby at the dining room table for the welcome home party, but the final scene shows her in the same instance, but alone in an empty house.

The ending of the movie, to me, didn't really tie anything up and leave me satisfied considering what the movie was showing me. Grace's postpartum depression doesn't ultimately get addressed formally or get resolved in any meaningful way. The ending shows Grace committing suicide by walking through a forest fire that she caused. Yet, that ending may not be "real" as the final scene shows her alive in an empty house.

I enjoy Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson as actors and think that Jennifer Lawrence as Grace was fantastic. She was very good at portraying a woman slowly losing her mind and her grasp on reality. The movie itself is a little hard to follow sometimes and I most likely missed out on some themes and symbolism that the movie was trying to convey to me, but that goes hand in hand with the type of character that Grace is. The audience just doesn't know, truly what's going on. The ending left more questions than answers and left me wondering what exactly I just watched. The feeling of isolation in the movie was very apparent with the set pieces and the cinematography, which is most likely another reason for Grace's mind slipping.

Overall, I rate this movie a 6/10. The ending doesn't do much in tying everything together and leaves the audience trying to piece together what actually happened. It is worth seeing if you are a fan of the main actors and enjoy a somewhat thought provoking movie.