There is a fight for authorship at the center of the mental-crisis drama Die My Love that drives most of its scene-to-scene tension. The project was initiated by its star, Jennifer Lawrence, after Martin Scorsese forwarded the source-material novel to her as a potential showcase for her acting talents. Indeed, Lawrence gets to run wild in the resulting movie adaptation of that book, the most violently expressive she’s been on screen since 2017’s mother! — no small feat. Somewhere in the process of adapting the book, however, Lawrence hired an equally ferocious authorial voice in Lynne Ramsay to direct. Instead of adapting a novel about postpartum depression, it appears Ramsay has pulled a fast one and adapted those Britney Spears knife-dancing videos to feature length instead, doing as much as she can to abstract & rattle the text until it is no longer recognizable as anything other than a Lynne Ramsay picture. Die My Love touches on all of Ramsay’s greatest hits—the feral playground brutality of Ratcatcher, the illustrated-mixtape rhythms of Morvern Callar, the mother-in-crisis chills of We Need to Talk About Kevin, the curdled social isolation of You Were Never Really Here—but it has to contend with a new disruption to the way she normally does things: an unrestrained Jennifer Lawrence. Typically, Ramsay’s filmmaking style is overtly intense while her protagonists convey a calm, quiet surface to onlookers, with their inner turmoil saved for the audience’s horror. Here, Lawrence is the loudest, brashest, most chaotic presence in every room, matching Ramsay’s firepower with her own histrionic arsenal, so that all eyes are constantly on her. It’s difficult to say whether either of those two voices overpower the other here, but the tension between them is undeniably compelling.

That tense creative partnership between actor & director is echoed in the onscreen marriage between Die My Love‘s two leads: JLaw & RPats. The young couple start off well enough in the early stretch when they’re nesting in their new rural Montana home, routinely getting wasted and fucking on every possible surface. That ferocious animal attraction fades once Lawrence is nursing the inevitable baby they make together, with Robert Pattinson’s husband figure finding an increasing number of excuses to spend time outside of the house “for work.” Lawrence’s mental health rapidly plummets as she raises their baby in extreme isolation, due partly to postpartum depression but due largely to the soul-crushing boredom of being left alone in the house. The barking dogs, buzzing flies, and baby-appropriate novelty songs that fill that house’s void are enough to drive anyone insane after a few months of solitude, and that’s before you consider the wild hormonal swings the human body suffers after giving birth. For Ramsay’s part, she mimics the “chopped up” mental state of postpartum mothers in her trademark dissociative editing style, which helps abstract a fairly typical romantic-drift-apart story into the more experiential nightmare of a woman on the verge. Meanwhile, Lawrence lashes out at how “fucking boring” the universe is by literally clawing at the walls of her new prison/home and begging her husband to fuck her like he used to, proving that she’s still a person to him and not just a baby-making appliance. She follows through on every intrusive thought that might break her out of the domestic pattern she’s doomed to repeat, including jumping through sliding glass doors just to feel something. If Die My Love were made by any other director you’d expect those violent shocks to be momentary fantasies (see: last year’s Nightbitch), but since it’s Lynne Ramsay we know to accept the worst at face value and brace for the fallout.

Not every moment in Die My Love is tension & strife. Lawrence’s mother-in-crisis finds a surprise source of patience & grace in her neighboring mother-in-law, played by Sissy Spacek. While the younger mother is suffering through the maddening isolation that follows bringing a new life into this world, the older mother is suffering the maddening isolation of watching a loved one leave this world. As she grieves the recent loss of her own husband (Nick Nolte), Spacek slips into a similar self-destructive trance as Lawrence, and the two women only find moments of peace in the monochrome moonlight while the rest of the world is asleep — unlikely common ground. Sissy is an inspired casting choice for the part, since her historic woman-on-the-verge performance in Carrie is just as core to the driven-mad-by-the-patriarchy canon as the more often-cited works of Gena Rowlands & Isabelle Adjani. Even within that looming context, Lawrence admirably holds her own here, even steamrolling the dependably off-putting Pattinson in her own unpredictable, unhinged antics. Ramsay is somewhat accommodating in her role behind the camera, allowing for a little more storytelling conventionality than is typical to her work (imagine, for instance, if Morvern Callar was hospitalized for depression instead of fucking off to a rave). There are a few harmonic moments when the star and director are working perfectly in collaboration to illustrate a young mother’s frazzled mental state. It’s arguable, though, that the movie is at its most compelling when those two creative voices are fighting for dominance, with both the acting and the filmmaking reaching such top-volume kettle whistles that it’s difficult to parse out any specific grace notes from one or the other. They’re both screaming for your attention, and the result is effectively maddening.

-Brandon Ledet