"Die, my love" is a chaotic but evocative journey through post-natal depression

So much cinema has told us what motherhood is. Being pregnant and expecting a child, the joys and sorrows of parenthood, the sense of euphoria and despair that it brings. However, there is a feeling that has remained more hidden, silenced as often happens to the very women who experience it. Almost a shame, something to keep hidden, so much so that it has long been a stigma better left unspoken: postpartum depression. Since it is a condition that is difficult to understand even for the women who suffer from it, it is truly challenging to portray it on the big screen through words and images. There is a need for help, for someone to confide in who understands without judgment the great discomfort. In close succession, two works have tried to outline a pattern: the analytical examination of the documentary Witches by Elizabeth Sankey and the adaptation of Ariana Harwicz's novel, Die, My Love by Lynne Ramsay. By giving her own personal testimony and inviting friends, colleagues, and "patients" met along her path, the British Sankey captures a vivid and sincere, at times painful, snapshot of the moment that is supposed to be one of the happiest in a woman's life, yet instead leads to the loss of the Self. In a comparison with the history of witches, the documentary does not hold back on the mothers it interviews, nor on its own director. And it is precisely in this way that the viewer is left stunned by the experiences they had to face, and for which many, before them, were accused of any fault, from being witches to being bad mothers. Although there is no redemption, because that is not what Elizabeth Sankey or these women should receive, their fate is the opposite of the fire that burns within the protagonist Grace, played by Jennifer Lawrence in Die, My Love.

Having become a mother and having left behind her career as a writer, the protagonist of Die, My Love sinks into a state of psychosis and delirium that director Ramsay accentuates with a disjointed montage and a constant sonic confusion. Grace takes care of her baby all day while her life runs the same every single day, with her husband Jackson (Robert Pattinson) no longer wanting to touch her and spending his time between work and his affairs. The narrative of the adaptation from Harwicz's novel is unrestrained and chaotic, like the protagonist's mind that gradually falls apart. To the frenzy and noise of the passion between Grace and Jackson is replaced by the constant chatter of the trees surrounding the couple's isolated house and the chirping of crickets that drill into the audience's ears. Ramsay's focus on sound work aims to immediately daze the audience and introduce them to the protagonist's confused state, reflecting her descent into the loss of her mental health, with the woman being the first to not want to accept it. Die, My Love becomes fragmented, an assemblage of scenes and moments that daze the viewers. It is the rendering of the protagonist's state in images, and, just as it happens to Grace, it ends up slipping out of Lynne Ramsay's hands, though it never loses the evocative aura that resonates and echoes from its segmented sequences.

Grace's motherhood is not demonized; on the contrary, it is clear that she wants to feel like a good mother. There is discussion about how much and when to hold her baby, how long to let him cry, the fact that a mother should know how to bake the cake for his birthday. But just as her sexual instincts are primitive and vibrant and manifest in ways Grace can no longer control, so too is the mania that in Die, My Love is never the task of the writing to reproduce, but rather of the images that become its only means of expression. Female parenthood is longing and raging, animalistic as was that of Amy Adams in Nightbitch, which did not delve into immediate postpartum depression but spoke nonetheless of the deprivation of one's personhood, replaced only by the role of a mother, seeking precisely in contact with the animal part her own center and freedom. The entire film is carried on the shoulders of Jennifer Lawrence, through her mood swings, her silent and unfulfilled cries for help, so necessary yet often despised. And if the lack of restraint imposed by Lynne Ramsay is the disruptive force with which Die, My Love can overwhelm, it is also what sometimes causes the incendiary film to falter, especially when it does not adequately balance the repeated anti-climaxes that give a discontinuous rhythm to the film, imperfect yet courageously unrestrained, surely as furious as the act of bringing someone into the world.