Day: November 7, 2025

Warning: This story contains spoilers for Die My Love.

If you’re wondering how the title Die My Love connects to a movie that has so far been branded by critics, a little reductively, as a “postpartum depression” drama, it’s because ultimately it all boils down to a doomed romance.

In the new darkly comic marital thriller from Lynne Ramsay (We Need to Talk About Kevin, You Were Never Really Here), aspiring novelist Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and her scruffy, country-born boyfriend Jackson (Robert Pattinson) swap New York City for the eerie, isolated wilds of Montana. Jackson has inherited a house from an uncle—who, we eventually learn, shot himself with a rifle—where the couple settles down to raise their first child. With the arrival of baby Harry and Jackson’s increasingly long absences from home, Grace’s life starts to come apart at the seams. The mother gradually descends into a mental health crisis from which no one can rescue her.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

The movie loosely takes its beats from Ariana Harwicz’s 2012 novel of the same name, “a surrealistic, dark fairy tale,” according to Ramsay. “It’s like, ‘Is this real? Is this not real?’ You’re kind of figuring it out.” Ramsay was liberal with the material, enlisting the help of writers Enda Walsh (Small Things Like These, Hunger) and Alice Birch (Normal People, Succession) on the script. The movie’s handling of themes of psychosis and motherhood kindled plenty of debate during its May premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, and its wide release into theaters on Nov. 7 is sure to reignite the conversation. Ramsay spoke to TIME to unpack its incendiary ending.

Read more: Jennifer Lawrence Gives Her Best Performance Yet in the Postpartum Fever Dream Die, My Love

An ominous beginning

When the couple first moves in, they are full of hope for their future together, chattering excitedly about their grand plans for Grace to pen the “great American novel,” or simply get a cat. But there is an ominous hint of what’s to come in this opening scene. Cinematographer Seamus McGarvey (who previously collaborated with Ramsay on We Need to Talk About Kevin) positions his camera inside the house, the low, static shot tracking their first steps into the ramshackle building. This results in a foreboding sequence, where we suspect from the jump that things might sour.

“When I saw the location, I thought it’d be really interesting to start in the interior of the house, this place that she feels quite trapped in,” Ramsay says. “It’s unconventional to start in an interior, like the house is looking at them, rather than the other way around.” The set-up became an accidental nod to The Shining, which is also about a couple—one of whom also has writers’ block—moving to a new home with a murky past. Ramsay adds: “It’s the sort of location like The Overlook where it feels like its own entity.”

All importantly, the treeline where Grace will finally meet her demise is visible through the patio window. It’s a shot Ramsay returns to at the film’s close, with Grace looking from the outside into what is meant to be her home.

In this moment, it becomes clear that Die My Love, rather than a bona fide postpartum depression story, is really an investigation into what it feels like to be at odds with the life you have built for yourself, to experience a rift between your internal landscape and the box you’ve put yourself in. “She sees herself from outside in a way, takes a look at her life, almost as if she was a stranger looking in,” Ramsay says.

Why does Grace and Jackson’s relationship fall apart?

That initial sense of dread doesn’t stop us getting caught up in Grace and Jackson’s frenzied, fiery romance. One of the earliest scenes shows the couple having passionate, animalistic sex, an overt reference to Malcolm McDowell and Christine Noonan’s sexually charged wrestling scene in the 1968 drama If. “He loves her, but he doesn’t get her,” Ramsay explains. “Maybe all the things that were really good in the relationship before— maybe the sex was great, maybe she’s a bit wild, maybe there’s been some mental health things in the past—those things are now becoming extreme and a bit alienating.”

Worsening Grace’s mental spiral, she discovers a pack of condoms in the glovebox of Jackson’s car, calling his his fidelity into question. Not to mention Grace’s own knife-edge liaisons with another new parent, Karl (LaKeith Stanfield), which she pursues to counter the numbing boredom of being stuck at home.

Jackson has been given the condoms by the mysterious, minor character Greg (Luke Camilleri), a childhood friend and a reminder that Jackson has returned to the community he grew up in, further reinforcing Grace’s status as an outsider. Though mentioned multiple times by Jackson, Greg only appears once. “You see him briefly at the party, if you look close enough,” says Ramsay. “But blink and you’ll miss him.”

Why does Grace disappear into the forest?

As in Harwicz’s novel, Die My Love concludes with a disastrous homecoming party. The circumstances, though, are more than a little uncomfortable: Grace comes back home after being committed to a mental health facility. Making one final attempt to fit the mold of perfect wife and mother, she bakes her own cake, with “welcome home” swirled across the top in blue icing. But the home she and Jackson had planned to cultivate together has been made-over in her absence. “When he’s done the house up, she’s been erased somewhat,” says Ramsay. “She doesn’t belong there anymore.” However, she insists, “there’s a real beauty in that he’s still trying, even though she’s going off into the wild.”

Cinema is no stranger to mothers pushed to the edge of sanity: in the last two years alone, we’ve had If I Had Legs I’d Kick You and Nightbitch. Ramsay cites two older films, A Woman Under the Influence (1974) and Repulsion (1965) as inspirations.Throughout Die My Love, the new mother pushes herself to ever-more violent extremes: hurling herself through, and thereby shattering, a window; or clawing at the walls. Despite being so visibly unhappy, it’s evident that Grace still loves her son. As she tells her psychiatrist, Harry is not the problem, “it’s everything else that’s f–cked”. Lawrence herself was over four months pregnant with her second child when she began filming, with Ramsay envisioning the role as “really feral.” “When you’re pregnant, you feel quite empowered in some ways. Lawrence just felt really raw [and had] this animalistic quality.”

In Jackson’s mother, Pam (Sissy Spacek), Grace finds a kindred spirit: a widow struggling with the recent death of her husband, who sleepwalks toting a gun. She first sounds the alarm about Grace’s behaviour and gives her permission to leave the excruciating party. “She just sees that this beast has to be free,” says Ramsay.

Where Ramsay departs from the book, though, is the climactic fire Grace sets ablaze in the nearby woods: the culmination of her anguish. “The end is quite metaphorical,” says Ramsay. “I mean, she burns her own book that she’s been writing. She burns work you’ve never seen. It’s like this woman burning her world down. At one point, I had her saving Rob from the forest and all ends well, but it just felt right in capping it there.” The forest is far enough away that baby Harry and everyone else at the party is safe. As Grace strides off into the fire—Jackson trying to stop her, but eventually letting her go, with a look of what seems to be relief on his face—we can only presume Grace perishes. “I wanted it to feel free, not dark, to have this kind of power in it.”

In this warped fable, everything comes back to the central couple’s twisted love. John Prine’s “In Spite of Ourselves,” Grace and Jackson’s anthem of sorts—sent to Ramsay by music supervisor Raife Burchell—sums it up: “Even though it’s got a country vibe, it’s quite a subversive song. I was like, oh God, it really has the vibe of what’s underneath this film—all the stuff that ain’t pretty under the relationship.”

People who lived in New York in the 1970s and ’80s are always cautioning against over-romanticizing the era: a dirt-cheap apartment often meant living with a bathtub sprouting from the middle of your kitchen, or having to step around junkies on your doorstep. You could be mugged at any hour of the day or night. But who could be blamed for wanting to live in the New York of Ira Sachs’ Peter Hujar’s Day, a 76-minute movie that feels quiet and modest while you’re watching it, only to fill the air around you once you’re left to sit with it a while? This is a New York movie that takes place solely within the walls of one apartment—a pretty nice one, not a dump—on Dec. 19, 1974. Yet it’s the quintessential film for anyone who loves the city as it is now, or as it was then. I’d wager that anyone who has walked through the city at night, marveling at its rows of exquisitely workaday prewar apartment buildings, has at some point looked up toward a window lit with life and wondered who might have lived there 50 years ago, or a hundred. Peter Hujar’s Day captures that elusive feeling of the past catching up with the present, in a city alive with whispering ghosts.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

New York is a city of talkers, and there’s a lot of talking in Peter Hujar’s Day. Sachs adapted the script from the rambling daylong interview that writer Linda Rosenkrantz conducted with photographer Peter Hujar on that winter day in 1974. She’d intended to do a whole book of interviews with New Yorkers in her orbit, detailing how they went about their days, though the project never materialized. The Hujar interview tapes, long lost, eventually resurfaced, appearing in book form in 2022. They’re the foundation for Sachs’ script, a whirl of friendly gossip, unselfconscious name dropping, and half-formed thoughts that paradoxically make perfect sense.

Ben Whishaw plays Hujar, admired for his art photography at the time, though he needed to do commercial work to pay the bills. Rosenkrantz is played by Rebecca Hall, an actor who always seems alive with electricity, even when she’s not moving a muscle; she doesn’t so much ply Hujar with questions as provide a receptive landing space for the explosion of details he provides about everything that happened to him the day before. Many of these things are tiny non-events, though his brain has recorded them with a photographer’s specificity.

Hujar begins at the beginning, recounting how his day started: an editor from Elle Magazine was going to come by to pick up a photograph—hopefully, he’d get paid for it? He hadn’t worked that part out. He mentions a fleeting straight-guy fantasy he’d entertained for a hot minute—maybe he’d be “seduced by the Elle girl”?—before moving on to other matters. Later in the day, he’d be going over to Allen Ginsberg’s apartment to photograph the groovy-avuncular poet for the New York Times, his first assignment for the paper, and an important one. But first, not long after awakening, he takes a little nap; later he’ll take another. When Rosenkrantz teases him about his excessive snoozing, he insists that “the first one wasn’t a nap, it was a continuation of my sleep,” a brilliant snippet of artist logic that you might be tempted to put into practice yourself. As Whishaw plays him, Hujar has an alluring, elfin carnality; he’s a seductive jokester, keyed into both the banality and the cracked glamour of the artist’s life. He’ll take it all.

Hujar and Rosencrantz talk all day and into the night, their patter a ribbony scroll of who’s who and who’s cool in their New York. Robert Wilson, Peter Orlovsky, Tuli Kupferberg, Glenn O’Brien: even if not all of them have been forgotten, some aren’t quite fully remembered—Peter Hujar’s Day puts a gentle spotlight on them once again. As Hujar and Rosencrantz talk, the light filtering through the windows changes, from milky sunshine to dusky late-afternoon velvet, and their moods shift too. Their costumes also change throughout the day, not because the characters have literally changed outfits, but because every long, rich, meandering conversation involves figurative costume changes, segues and digressions that are just as expressive as our clothes are. Hujar and Rosencrantz are friends; their conversation has a loping ease. At one point they laze about on the bed, their limbs gently entwined, not like lovers but like bear cubs. Sachs and his actors capture the texture of the easy, affectionate friendships we have when we’re young and beautiful (even if we have no idea how beautiful we are)—maybe this is what Adam and Eve were like before they were kicked out of Eden, before sex and shame entered the picture.

Hujar died in 1987, at age 53, 10 months after being diagnosed with AIDS. Though he was not exactly famous outside downtown New York art circles during his lifetime, his work—particularly his elegantly expressive black-and-white portraits—came to represent a vivid swath of 1970s and ’80s New York. His 1969 photograph “Orgasmic Man,” a portrait of a man caught in the shimmering cross-current between pain and near-religious erotic ecstasy, found new life when it was used on the cover of Hanya Yanagihara’s 2015 novel A Little Life, a book we all saw in airport bookstores, being read on the subway, or carried around to fill in the idle moments of a random day. Even if you didn’t know who Peter Hujar was, suddenly you knew that photograph.

Peter Hujar’s Day gives Peter Hujar another kind of life. Sachs is attuned to both the costs and the pleasures of living in the godforsaken place known as New York. In his 2014 Love Is Strange, an aging couple (John Lithgow and Alfred Molina), recently married, are forced to live separately when a change in their financial situation forces them to sell their artsy, decidedly un-ostentatious apartment. It’s a movie about love, New York, and real estate, perhaps not even in that order; it’s about how New York can be both lovely and hateful, sometimes from one hour to the next. Peter Hujar’s Day is both dreamier and more concrete. Its New York is a place where the past, no matter how many buildings we knock down and replace, no matter how many beloved stores and restaurants we lose, keeps reaching around to touch the present. You can feel that past—those many pasts—vibrating from every lit-up window, because everywhere in the city, on any given evening, there’s someone talking about the minutiae of their day. Are we made of stardust or just the random stuff we do? Maybe they’re one and the same.