AMAZING GRACE

Jennifer Lawrence is simply brilliant as Grace, a new mother descending into madness, in Lynne Ramsay's 'Die My Love', but Daniel Day-Lewis shouldn't have bothered coming out of retirement for his son's 'Anemone'

- Clarisse Loughrey

Madness feels itchy. In Die My Love, we hear it in the constant ho-hum buzz of the flies, their dirty, spindly limbs always threatening to brush against vulnerable skin. We see it in the abandoned house carpeted in dry, brittle leaves and the clashing patterns of chintzy floral wallpaper. We sense it in the breast milk dripped carelessly from a nipple into a puddle of ink, looked down upon by a creator on two fronts, mother and writer - but signifying nothing but the universe sapped of its significance.

When the woman consumed by madness in Lynne Ramsay's abrasively beautiful Die My Love is played by Jennifer Lawrence, words become unnecessary. Her character, Grace, has recently relocated from New York to live in a house once occupied by the dead uncle of her husband Jackson (Robert Pattinson), in order to raise their newborn son. The uncle shot himself there. You can sense his ghost pounding on the walls.

Grace never really talks about her emotions in this, Ramsay's adaptation of an equally internalised 2012 novel by Ariana Harwicz. No one discusses a diagnosis, a treatment plan, or any deep-rooted causes, experiential or genetic, although postpartum depression and possibly psychosis seem likely. There's no grand confession of the abyss inside.

That's why Lawrence is here. She's a master at simultaneously playing the truth and the performance in front of it, and this is some of her very best work in that realm. Grace's misery is buried so deep that we, the audience, can feel its waves beating at the door, and yet it's easy to believe, too, how everyone around her can be so blind to it.