Die My Love had its world premiere in the main competition of the 78th Cannes Film Festival on May 17, 2025, where it received a nine-minute long standing ovation[1], the 11th longest standing ovation of the 2025 festival[2].
Premise
Grace and Jackson, a young couple who move from New York City to Jackson’s rural childhood home in Montana, are in search of a quieter life. As they adjust to their new surroundings and become parents, Grace begins to struggle with feelings of isolation and psychological distress. Her deteriorating mental health gradually drives their marriage into unsettling and unpredictable territory.[3]
Martin Scorsese (left) and star Robert Pattinson (right) worked as a producer and as an executive producer on the film, respectively.
The film is an adaptation of Ariana Harwicz's 2012 novel Die, My Love. In 2020, Martin Scorsese sent the novel to Excellent Cadaver (run by Jennifer Lawrence and Justine Ciarrochi) after reading it in his book club, envisioning an adaptation with Lawrence in the lead role.[4] In November 2022, Lawrence confirmed she would star in the film, which Lynne Ramsay was co-writing with playwright Enda Walsh.[5] Ramsay became involved as director after Lawrence sent her the book.[6] Ramsay was initially going to pass on the project as she had already done similar postpartum themes with We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) and offered another project to Lawrence. Lawrence declined the other project, insisting on working on Die My Love together, to which Ramsay eventually agreed to when she decided to focus on it being a "bonkers, crazy love story," rather than about postpartum depression.[7][8]
Her first film since You Were Never Really Here (2017), Ramsay approached Walsh to write the first draft of the script and agreed to write the second and final draft.[9][10]Alice Birch also took part in co-writing the script.[10] In the script, the location was changed to the United States, whereas in the book it was set in rural France.[6] By April 2024, Ramsay and George Vjestica were writing music for Lawrence to record.[11]
In July 2024, Robert Pattinson was in talks to join the film, produced by Scorsese and Andrea Calderwood alongside the Excellent Cadaver team of Lawrence and Ciarrocchi.[12] In August, LaKeith Stanfield, Sissy Spacek, and Nick Nolte joined the cast.[13][14] The film is a thriller,[15] while Ramsay and Pattinson have also described it as a dark comedy, with the former saying "it's my kind of comedy and love story, so it's going to be dark and fucked-up" and the latter calling it "hilarious".[6][16][17]
Pattinson related an anecdote about being extremely nervous for a dance sequence and being unable to convince Ramsay and Lawrence to cut or choreograph the scene.[22] He took dancing classes for the role.[17] He later spoke further about the environment on set, specifically dialogue changes: "It is just quite an unusual environment… Some of the stuff we’re doing… there’s one scene where there were three or four pages of dialogue, and we turn up and Lynne says, 'I think I’m just going to do it with no dialogue.' It’s kind of scary, but it’s very, very exciting. It makes you feel very alive."[23]
On the experience of dealing with the darker material whilst being four-and-a-half months pregnant at the beginning of filming, Lawrence said that what her character "[goes] through is the hormonal imbalance that comes from postpartum. [...] I had "great hormones! I was feeling great, which is the only way I would be able to dip into this emotion." However, whilst reading the book, Lawrence spoke of it being hard to separate what she would do differently from Grace, the character, and called it "heartbreaking."[23] She related with the identity crisis her character went through as a mother and that, despite having a "great postpartum with [her] first" child when she read Harwicz' book, she experienced "a really hard postpartum" period following the birth of her second. Lawrence felt that watching the movie in retrospect of experiencing postpartum depression was "really bizarre [...] after feeling like I've been through that forest."[24]:0:07:37
In April 2025, the film secured a spot at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. It premiered at the festival, in competition for the Palme d'Or, on May 17.[25] The recently launched 193 handled distribution sales.[10] Shortly after its Cannes premiere, Mubi acquired distribution rights to the film in North and Latin America, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, the Benelux, Turkey, India, Australia and New Zealand for $24 million, their largest acquisition to date, committing to a theatrical release for 45 days on 1,500 screens across the United States.[26][27] It is scheduled to be released in the United States on November 7, 2025.[28]
The work of Jennifer Lawrence (left) and director Lynne Ramsay (right) received critical acclaim, with many citing the former as having given the best performance of her career.
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 78% of 49 critics' reviews are positive.The website's consensus reads: "A frenzied depiction of a common but oft-ignored experience, Die My Love might be too stylistically mannered to fully connect but gifts Jennifer Lawrence with one of her most vivid roles yet."[33]Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 75 out of 100, based on 22 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.[34]
Many critics singled out Lawrence's performance, which Deadline Hollywood described as deserving of an Academy Award, and Ramsay's direction for praise.[35] Tim Grierson of Screen International declared Lawrence "the match that lights Lynne Ramsay's gripping, slow-burn fifth feature."[36] Nicholas Barber of BBC wrote that Lawrence "is better than ever."[37]
Rafa Sales Ross of The Playlist wrote that Lawrence is the "undeniable propulsive force" of the film, furthermore stating that her "rare ability to swing from the effortless charm of the classic movie star straight into the dark abyss that houses the odd and the grotesque lends itself perfectly to a role as tangled as Grace."[38]Stephanie Zacharek of Time raved about both the film and Lawrence's performance, writing: "There’s no other movie on the landscape like it," and "it’s the kind of performance you go to the movies for, one that connects so sympathetically with the bare idea of human suffering that it scares you a little."[39]
Dave Calhoun of Time Out labeled it as a "deeply raw and honest film," further saying: "It’s bleak, but it also has a musical, black-comic, big-hearted spirit that pulls you through the despair."[40]Owen Gleiberman of Variety thought that Die My Love does not explore the experiences about the burdens of motherhood, observing that it is instead designed "as a kind of thesis movie: reckless on the surface but overdetermined."[41]
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