Die My Love

Another top-notch downer from Lynne Ramsay (Ratcatcher, Morvern Callar, We Need to Talk About Kevin, You Were Never Really Here). The Scottish filmmaker, along with playwrights Enda Walsh and Alice Birch, and producers Martin Scorsese and Jennifer Lawrence, adapts Ariana Harwicz's novel about isolation and mental illness into a rivetingly spare and abrasive postpartum fever dream. Lawrence and Robert Pattinson are wonderfully miserable as aging New York hipsters who uproot themselves to Montana, have a baby, and start hating each other. Both Lawrence and Ramsay are so well-suited to this material that it almost feels like the film could have been made without dialogue, and we'd still be able to follow every beat.

Lawrence's performance is worthy of comparison to Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence. She'll be called "brave" for all the nudity and masturbation scenes, but it's her incredible stuff with the yappy, shitty little dog that's truly courageous! Pattinson manages to make the dishonest and disinterested boyfreind-/husband amazingly sympathetic. Sissy Spacek and Nick Nolte add quiet notes meant to reassure Lawrence's increasingly depressed and erratic mother, but their examples only make her thoughts and feelings appear all the more inevitable. Ramsay's delightfully difficult picture makes Darren Aronofsky's Jennifer Lawrence film, Mother!, seem even sillier and more adolescent in comparison.