Despite being absolutely stockpiled with specifics, John Prine and Iris DeMent’s In Spite of Ourselves has proven awfully malleable. Featured prominently in the home stretch of Die My Love, the song was also deployed earlier this year in Materialists, though its effect on the two movies could hardly be more divergent. In Celine Song’s faux romantic comedy, Prine and DeMent’s wonky, descriptive back-and-forth mapped neatly onto the film’s burgeoning affair, a stand-in for the way that true partnerships come prepackaged with all manner of eccentricities, even if the lyrical particulars were dissimilar to the pair at hand. The more lucid the details, it would seem, the more relevant to the interpersonal abnormalities that attend every partnership, though in writer/director Lynne Ramsay’s latest, those identifying factors are hard to come by. Rather than bolstering the film’s central union, the ditty seems to chafe against a duo who’s lost the ability to communicate, and might not have been genuinely familiar in the first place. After all, can you really be intimate with someone without knowing how they like their eggs?

Upon making their acquaintance, the only thing we can glean for certain about Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson) is their mutual, carnal hunger for one another. Relocating from New York to the rural Montana abode of Jackson’s late uncle, the paramours’ afternoon tossels quickly result in a pregnancy, though Grace’s swollen belly only occupies a brief sliver of screentime. It’s quickly ushered out by the sight of a newborn baby boy, accompanied by a severe bout of postpartum depression that Jackson treats as a passing lark. With her boyfriend constantly away for work, Grace begins to unravel, presenting danger to both herself and others that she’s powerless to explain. When you’re falling this freely down the rabbit hole, words don’t offer much in the way of traction.

Taking this simple truth to heart, Ramsey’s screenplay, co-written by Enda Walsh and Alice Birch, flees from recognizable plotting at every pass. Unspooled as a dreamy sequence of vignettes, Die My Love is always more enthralled with a particularly sticky image than a meaningful exchange of dialogue, shots of Lawrenece sitting inside of an open fridge or clawing at the wallpaper of the couple’s grimy bathroom wedging their way into the viewer’s subconscious. Its tone poem bonafides are bolstered by a slippery timeline, hopping back and forth with only Grace’s self-inflicted wounds to chart the when and where of the events on screen. This type of surreal, untethered approach only works if the optical presentation rises to the moment, a test that cinematographer Seamus McGarvey passes with flying, saturated colors. His boxy 4:3 aspect ratio captures the whole thing in a sumptuous haze, a beatific counterbalance to a movie that’s unafraid of getting down in the mud. Thankfully, neither is Lawrence.

Lightyears removed from the disaffected cool of her most famous work, the erstwhile Katniss Everdeen is fully dialed into Ramsey’s feral frequency, her turn more befitting of an athlete than a thespian. Calling any performance ‘brave’ is usually code for lots of nudity, and while that shorthand is plenty applicable, the actor’s constant state of undress is here for more than shock value. Birth’s not something you walk away from unchanged, and Lawrence’s crawling and writhing do more to explore a woman’s uphill battle to reacclimate with their body than spoken language ever could. Watching one of the world’s biggest movie stars morph into an animal before your very eyes is powerful, confrontational stuff, so overwhelming that you can sort of understand Jackson’s near constant state of booze-addled paralysis… up to a point.

Aloofness is nothing new in the winding annals of bad cinematic boyfriends, and representing the cruel disengagement of the lesser sex is both believable and fair game. It’s also a narrative dead end, something Die My Love’s 2025 spiritual companion, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, worked around by keeping its protagonist’s checked-out partner largely off-screen. Pattinson is present, but only in physical form, stuck in a morass of indecision that turns his centerpiece scenes into a chore. It’s not the actor’s fault, just as you wouldn’t blame Sissy Spacek, Nick Nolte, or LaKeith Stanfield for withering in the impressive shadow that Lawrence is casting. It’s her story, and while you wouldn’t want any of the side players to step on her primacy, it turns their scenes into a labyrinth of holding patterns and unwanted diversions.

They even function as a security measure, creating a safe distance between the audience and a movie that’s ravenous enough to devour you without chewing. Part action and part insinuation, Die My Love balances its characters’ identifiable faux pas, like leaving an infant unattended or retreats into the arms of a new lover, with symbolic, amorphous implication. Passages that situate Grace as a witch in her very own haunted woods, or the sexualized fruit that sits abandoned at a vacant dinner table, never verbalize their nebulous ruminations, and would surely keep their voices down if words were ever necessary. These are right brain assaults, with your left side busily contending with the audio mix’s persistent aural affronts, smashing near-silent moments of reprieve against needle drops that threaten to blow out speakers. The dog that Jackson adopts near the start of the third act is surely here for metaphorical reasons, but you get the feeling that Ramsey views its anxiety-inducing yips as quite the addition to her abrasive sonic palette.

The art of confrontation is largely absent at your local multiplex, making Die My Love’s ambition to maim a stomach-turning reward unto itself. Putting you directly into the headspace of a spiraling mind is no easy feat, and Ramsey deserves credit for tackling an under-discussed topic with such aggression and fervor, but the anonymity of the characters keep sympathy out of reach. Perhaps empathy was the only goal anyway, and while Die My Love soars in that regard, one wonders what a little bit of tactile shading would have done for the whole enterprise. Placing Grace and Jackson on the socioeconomic spectrum is a tortured endeavor, a pair or metropolitan hipsters who double as country bumpkins, dancing to ironic records while heating up Easy Mac, alluding to artistic, learned pursuits with rudimentary word choices. They’re impossible to peg, and Prine and DeMent carve out more dimensionality in three minutes than Ramsey, Lawrence, and Pattinson do in two hours. It feels intentional, sanding the players’ peculiarities down until they’re more vessel than person, perfect conduits for the viewers’ understanding and self-projection. Just don’t expect to know Grace and Jackson by the end of your encounter; in spite of themselves, they’re not really sure either.