Descending into madness, brilliantly

IN AN EARLY SCENE IN LYNNE Ramsay’s brutal, beautiful Die My Love, we see Jennifer Lawrence crawling through a sunny, grassy field on all fours, low to the ground like a sultry panther, as we hear a baby crying somewhere nearby—it turns out he’s been parked, safely, on a porch.

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Lawrence goes not just to the edge but beyond it

We don’t know what Lawrence’s precise, feral belly crawl means—did I mention that she’s clutching a kitchen knife?—except somewhere in our gut we do know. The animal thing that drives us to pair up, to have sex, to fall in love, is the precursor to the adored pink being crying on the porch, the living, wailing, needy thing you’d do anything for.

Die My Love, in theaters Nov. 7, is about something no one wants to talk about: not just postpartum depression, but full-on madness for which there’s no cure, not even temporary relief. In the real world, it would be diagnosed as psychosis, but Ramsay’s film, adapted from Ariana Harwicz’s slender scalpel of a novel, isn’t about symptoms, causes, or treatments. It’s about pure feeling, highs and lows that ought to balance one another but somehow don't. This is also the most complex, unsettling, and bleakly funny performance Lawrence—a fine, persuasive, charming actor since the beginning—has given.