Review: 'Die My Love' is a dark ride into madness that gives Jennifer Lawrence the grittiest and most compelling role of her career

Director Lynne Ramsay excels at digging into what makes people uncomfortable, and making audiences confront those uncomfortable truths — and in her latest, “Die My Love,” she brings two of our best and most charismatic actors, Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson, along for the dark ride.

Lawrence plays Grace and Pattinson plays Jackson, a young couple who has recently relocated from an unnamed big city for a house in rural Montana. The house belonged to Jackson’s uncle, recently deceased under circumstances that are not initially divulged. The plan is for Jackson to go to work while Grace, a writer by trade, has time to work on her future masterpiece.

When the two are in the house together, in the beginning, they tear each other’s clothes off. Lawrence and Pattinson eagerly sign on to Ramsay’s vision of this young, stupendously horny couple, creating sex scenes that look as though the jobs of intimacy coordinator and animal wrangler were interchangeable.

The romance starts to stumble when Grace becomes pregnant and, with no obligatory birthing scene, becomes mother to a baby boy. Jackson, when he’s home, notes that Grace’s behavior is often strange, and possibly dangerous to herself and others. Is Grace suffering from a postpartum psychosis — or have the demons been circling long before that?

Jackson is familiar with mothers with issues. His own mother, Pam (Sissy Spacek), sleeps with a shotgun — left behind by Jackson’s father, Harry (Nick Nolte). In early scenes, when Harry is alive but clearly in the midst of dementia, we see that Grace has a clearer connection with him than his wife or their son. 

Ramsay — writing with Enda Walsh (“Hunger”) and Alice Birch (“Lady Macbeth”), adapting a novel by Ariana Harwicz — keeps the film tightly focused on Grace, as she walks through this Montana landscape, sometimes pushing a stroller and other times prowling like a wild beast. Even as she centers the action on Grace, Ramsay also spares some attention for Jackson, thinking he’s responsible for holding the family together but failing to recognize the scale of Grace’s madness.

It’s up to Lawrence, with an assist from Pattinson, to follow Grace down that path of mental instability — and keep her fascinating through every step down. It’s one of the most earthy, gutsy and compelling performances Lawrence has ever given, and it nearly makes “Die My Love” a mad masterpiece.

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‘Die My Love’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, November 7, in theaters. Rated R for sexual content, graphic nudity, language, and some violent content. Running time: 119 minutes.