Playing ‘crazy’ has never been a particularly easy task for an actor. There’s always the risk of veering into gibbering lunacy, or perhaps stigmatizing mental health in other ways. For Jennifer Lawrence, playing the troubled new mother Grace, she has the additional pressure of portraying post-partum depression and psychosis, a condition that we are only now beginning to completely medically understand. And she does it with such heartbreaking verve and prickly inscrutability that it’s hard to find any fault at all. 

In Lynne Ramsay’s latest feature Die My Love, a bold, thoughtful, impressionistic artist takes an ambitious swing at portraying mental illness, toxic romance, and gender constraints in brilliant ways. Grace is a writer who lives with her husband-to-be Jackson (Robert Pattinson is half-hearted about his support for Grace until it interrupts his life too much to ignore). They have just moved into his late uncle’s large, isolated rural home. She’s about to have his baby, and seems deliriously in love. But in abrupt cut forward to six months later, she is limp and disassociated, physically carrying a psychic weight we can all but see on her shoulders, and too foggy to write a word.

Jackson is away often for work, and his roving eye begins to find other targets; their sex life falls off, and the enormity of Grace’s isolation and sadness swallows her. She has stints in and out of the psychiatric ward; moments of reprieve in the sun with her beloved baby boy; the well-meaning if ultimately useless kindness of her elderly mother-in-law (Sissy Spacek, doing wonderful, quiet work here.) But none of it is enough for the centre—that is, a nuclear family that functions—to hold. Pattinson, too, is brilliant as the exhausted and bewildered man who watches the woman he loves continually become lost in her own mind. Lawrence, whose oddball tics, tendency toward filth and frequent masturbation, and general lack of social niceties clearly embarrass her husband, is fearless here.

If you’re looking for the narrative precision of Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here or even the firm social realism of the clear touchstone for Ramsay—A Woman Under the Influence—you may find yourself uncertain about Die My Love: there’s nothing clean or neat about it, in style nor subject. Some of that is by dint of its flaws—some unnecessary fat on its bones. Not all of Ramsay’s more fantastical flourishes land—a likely figment of Grace’s imagination, for instance, who she sneaks off for trysts with (played by LaKeith Stanfield, too talented an actor to be underused). But I’d also contend that the maximalism and the messiness is at least partly the point. It’s confusing to be in the eye of this storm—both for Grace and for her loved ones, particularly Jackson, whose bumbling inability to fix anything inspires a mixture of pity and frustration.

The material might also seem to risk repetition at times—almost an endless litany of a glassy-eyed Lawrence being, well, ‘crazy’: clawing her fingernails bloody on a bathroom wall, disappearing with her infant on walks for hours on end to the frantic concern of her husband, or throwing herself through a plate-glass window ad infinitum—well, you get the idea. Severe mental illness like Grace’s—disassociation and despair punctuated by hallucinatory streaks of violent self-harm and loathing – is repetitive by nature, cyclical, and exhausting. But what Die My Love does have is an exuberance and empathy for the highs and lows of its central relationship, where occasional warmth and affection blooms briefly and erratically between bursts of Grace’s madness. One particularly affecting scene sees the pair, worn down and at the brink, sing a duet of a country song to one another in the car, howling an ode to impossible, broken, codependent love. As an exploration of where hormonal imbalance, mental health struggle, and toxic relationships coalesce—and how you can ever untangle where they begin and end—Die My Love is masterful. And often, devastating.