The director Lynne Ramsay makes so few films that each one feels precious and fragile, like an endangered red squirrel or a Christmas Day snowfall. Die My Love is her first in eight years and only her fourth feature this century, partly because she is picky, a perfectionist, and would rather walk away from a project that doesn’t fully meet her needs. I’ve loved her work for decades which meant I was pretty much first in line when Die My Love screened at Cannes back in May. Ramsay devotees have grown accustomed to the director’s habit of briefly surfacing only to again disappear. Her films are small miracles; she always leaves us wanting more. And yet this time – perhaps for the first time – I was left wanting more from the movie itself.
Certain films take a while to settle, for their true strengths and weaknesses to turn themselves to the light, and so it was with Die My Love, which is technically flawless and barely puts a foot wrong. This casts Robert Pattinson and Jennifer Lawrence in eye-catching, Oscar-bait roles as Jackson and Grace, the most volatile newlyweds since Burton and Taylor. The couple have moved from New York to a family home in Montana, where Grace has vague plans to write the next great American novel. But she’s a fish out of water, a virtual prisoner; married alive in the middle of nowhere and sunk to her armpits in postpartum depression. Something has to give – and if she’s lucky, it’s her marriage.
This is subject matter, in short, which fits Ramsay like a glove. The Scottish-born director is fascinated by people in extremis; by themes of social order and transgression and by the stubborn incompatibility of our public and private selves. But she is also, on this evidence, fascinated by America, dazzled by its iconography to the point where the tropes start calling the shots of her fiction.
Fascination itself is no bad thing, it’s the fuel that powers every worthwhile work of art, except that Ramsay arranges the midwest as a series of picturesque stage-flats. Jackson and Grace live in a white clapboard house with a sun-dappled front porch. At night they can hear the crickets in the cornfield and the lonesome whistle of a passing freight train, although neither of these is loud enough to wake Jackson’s mom (played by Sissy Spacek), who has a policy of sleeping with a shotgun at her side. And while Montana no doubt contains all these items – clapboard homes, crickets, gun-toting old women – Ramsay points them out just a little too eagerly. Her film’s like an American-themed showhome: impressive, self-conscious and ever so slightly sterile.
It’s the obligatory rude question one asks every non-Hollywood director: when are you going to make an American film? As though we’re setting them up to make a total ass of themself. As if a total, jarring change of scene will somehow inspire them to produce their finest work. But Wong Kar-wai crashed and burned with the ludicrous My Blueberry Nights (2007), and Paolo Sorrentino came a cropper with his Goth-rock Nazi-hunting caper This Must Be the Place (2011), while Pedro Almodovar’s The Room Next Door (2024) stalled and skidded before belatedly righting itself. I’ll confess a certain fondness for Almodovar’s first English-language venture, which surprised most observers by winning last year’s Venice Golden Lion. But I’ll also admit it’s small beans compared to his old Madrid masterworks.
I’m not sure why some directors make the move better than others. Hollywood, after all, was mostly a European invention, designed and defined by immigrant talent, while a fresh eye on America usually pays dividends. That’s what’s given us Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960) and Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005) and Andrea Arnold’s American Honey (2016). And yet American films work best when they keep the story at the centre and America in the bloodstream; when they aren’t burdened by the weight of all the other American films that went before, or so seduced by the attractions that they approach the place like a tourist.
If there exists the cinematic equivalent of a thumbs-up selfie beside the Statue of Liberty, it can be seen in My Blueberry Nights, with its theme-park spread of soft-top sports cars and illuminated jukeboxes. It’s there in the flashback sequences of The Room Next Door, which feature flatbed trucks and chocolate milkshakes and a burning house on the open prairie. Regrettably it can be seen, too, in Die My Love, a film that plays like an Andrew Wyeth painting made flesh or a country ballad come to life and yet which nonetheless never quite becomes its own thing. It’s a compelling marital drama, punchy and well-played, but that off-the-peg Americana feels rote and overused. It leaves this most distinctive of directors looking almost commonplace.
Ramsay began her career with Ratcatcher (1999), a spellbinding rites-of-passage drama that summoned 1970s Glasgow in all its dirty, ragged, fine-grained glory. She cemented it with the rapturous Morvern Callar (2002), which was part romance, part ghost story and part revengers’ tragedy. Die My Love, though, is her third consecutive US-set picture, following We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) and You Were Never Really Here (2017), and although she’s nothing like Grace, run aground in Montana, the climate doesn’t suit her and I miss the depth and strangeness of those early Scottish years.
Sorrentino and Almodovar have already demonstrated how not to make a great American movie. Happily they have both also shown the perfect restorative next step. Scalded by his US road trip, Sorrentino promptly returned to Italy to shoot The Great Beauty (2013), far and away his finest picture to date. Almodovar, for his part, was recently reported to be in the Canary Islands working on a Spanish-language drama called Bitter Christmas. As for Ramsay, she’s typically weighing her options, keeping her powder dry, but says that she plans to make her next film back in Glasgow. That’s not a retreat, it’s a return to the well. It suggests that a great British filmmaker is at last coming home.
‘Die My Love’ is in cinemas from 7 November
