By Michael Marano

Die My Love is a healthy bitch-slap, its shock encouraging young folks to dismiss the bullshit about relationships too many other movies have hawked over the past decade and a half or so.

Die My Love, directed by Lynne Ramsay. Screening at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, AMC Theaters, the Alamo Drafthouse.

Jennifer Lawrence in a scene from Die My Love.

Within the first three minutes of Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love, we see Katniss Everdeen and Edward Cullen butt naked and fucking like coked-out alley cats on a kitchen floor.

The sight of two teeny-bopper icons of a few years ago rutting in a manner that makes you wonder if they’re up to date on their rabies shots is jarring in exactly the way it needs to be. It reminds tens of millions of Millennials and some Gen Z kids that they, and their YA idols, aren’t kids anymore. They and their heroes have more pressing things to worry about than what they’ll wear when interviewed by Caesar Flickerman or what those pesky Volturi are up to. They have real shit to deal with, like finding places to live, aging parents, kids, weddings, jobs, circles of friends they don’t actually like, bills, and the festering psychic gangrene of dreams not deferred, but smothered.

Die My Love, as a deconstruction and savage refutation of what marital bliss and childbearing is marketed to be, is a natural companion to Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, which featured Tilda Swinton as a woman with a dream job as writer that she dumps to order to be trapped in the ‘burbs and raise a kid she doesn’t want. Here we have Jennifer Lawrence as a writer trapped in an apocalyptic inversion of novelist Kent Haruf’s wholesome Heartland, brain-fogged by postpartum depression and boredom while hubby Robert Pattinson gets to travel all over for his work. Yeah, his employment looks like it’s a shitty job. He takes the gig after his ambitions as a musician have withered and died. But at least he leaves the house and has burgers and shakes at truck stops in a way that makes his sweetie seethe with a kind of jealousy that she doesn’t exhibit regarding the truck-stop waitresses he bangs.

Lawrence and Pattinson inherit a farmhouse from hubby’s (amusingly? interestingly?) late uncle. It looks like a dump suitable for Leatherface and his brothers to squat, the kind of setting in which a great aunt in a Hallmark movie would advise a big city girl to follow her heart and hook up with the flannel-shirt-wearing hunk down the road. (The type of guy who would, in real life, leave her to fend for herself while he goes to his regional Proud Boys meetings, but never mind). Nearby are Pattinson’s parents, played by Sissy Spacek and Nick Nolte, evoking the dysfunctional small-town denizens they portrayed in Affliction. Ramsay seems to be in a dialogue with a number of other movies, not least of which would be Aronosfky’s Mother!, in which Lawrence played a young woman trapped in a house by the ambitions of her shit-headed and self-absorbed artist partner.

It takes a while for Die My Love to really become what it is. The opening 30 or 40 minutes are taken up by Ramsay’s cinematic dialogue. I might be wrong, but I think I caught whiffs of Revolutionary Road, Lars von Trier’s Antichrist and yeah, Goddard’s Weekend, in which an urban couple descend into emotional and physical savagery when they’re plopped into the countryside.

And what is it that Die My Love becomes?

The most uncomfortable examination of domestic partnership since Shoot the Moon.

And the most uncomfortable examination of domestic confinement since Repulsion.

Lawrence is stuck in a house that is crushing her, with a baby she and Pattinson have not named, and the most annoyingly yappy, crappy dog in cinematic history. I love dogs, but I was ready to punt that mutt into a wood chipper. Walking out under the huge sky and endless fields around her house offers no real relief from Lawrence’s sense of confinement. Ramsay’s genius has always been to trap us in the heads of her mentally ill protagonists. Consider Samantha Morton as the grieving, sociopathic plagiarist in Morven Caller, or Joaquin Phoenix as the PTSD-crippled vet in You Were Never Really Here. But here Lawrence is trapped by walls plastered with 1950s floral wallpaper — and we’re trapped in her head as post-partum depression soaks her neurons. Her mental illness pushes out against what’s pushing in on her, and we’re along for the ride, because we’re feeling as claustrophobic as she. Ramsay shoots Die My Love on 35mm in a 4:3 ratio, at once giving the movie a Terrence Malick kind of grain, but through a keyhole-narrow kind of myopia that makes even the thousands of square acres Lawrence trots through something that offers no escape.

This erasure of the barrier between the audience and Lawrence’s going nuts makes Die My Love a cinematic take on Antonin Artuad’s Theater of Cruelty — the use of dangerous and primitive performative techniques to break down the barriers that keep the audience feeling safe. And Lawrence’s performance is brilliant and stunning and courageous because it so completely embraces danger and primitiveness. Her work is gloriously atavistic. She howls. She barks. She crawls like a panther, spits beer, claws the walls, masturbates, does things with her body I don’t think any other actress has done in a mainstream film. Like Mrs. Bates, she makes you really nervous watching her walk around with a kitchen knife. She full-on adopts Artaud’s nonverbal use of movements and sounds and gestures to assault the audience’s sensibilities.

Lawrence’s Theater of Cruelty-style blitz and Ramsay’s depiction of shared psychosis intends to make even the most genteel audience member question every relationship they have… spousal, parental, filial, even the relationship between people and their pets.

The bravery of Lawrence’s performance is not for the milk-livered. Die My Love is exhausting, and that’s its greatest virtue. We don’t watch her performance. We share a folie à deux with her.

The Hunger Games and Twilight movies were fairy tales. And, as a fable, so is Die My Love. It is a healthy bitch-slap, its shock encouraging young folks to dismiss the bullshit about relationships too many other movies have hawked over the past decade and a half or so. The movie has flaws. But Ramsay’s and Lawrence’s bravery make it a work of disturbing brilliance.

Author, critic, and personal trainer Michael Marano, like probably a million disaffected kids of the 1980s, first read Antonin Artuad after he heard the song about him by the goth band Bauhaus.