lynne ramsay

Die My Love (2025)

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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

Episode #58 of The Swampflix Podcast: Lynne Ramsay & Caché (2005)

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Welcome to Episode #58 of The Swampflix Podcast. For our fifty-eighth episode, James & Brandon discuss all four feature films directed by the notoriously “uncompromising” Scottish auteur Lynne Ramsay, including her most recent work, You Were Never Really Here (2018). James also makes Brandon watch Michael Haneke’s surveillance footage whodunnit Caché (2005) for the first time. Enjoy!

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

-James Cohn & Brandon Ledet

You Were Never Really Here (2018)

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One of the most infamous scenes of onscreen cinematic violence is not actually as gratuitous in its visual depiction of brutality as you might think. Alfred Hitchcock’s staging of the shower stabbing in Psycho crams 78 camera setups and 52 individual cuts into 45 seconds of footage (which is where the documentary on the scene, 78/52, gets its name), bewildering its audience with a fractured visual narrative that makes us feel like we’re seeing more explicit violence than we are. Our minds fill in the gaps. Director Lynne Ramsay’s latest grime-coated vision of a real-world Hell sustains this technique for the entire runtime of a feature-length crime narrative. You Were Never Really Here is being frequently compared to the violent third act catharsis of Taxi Driver, which is understandable considering its on-paper premise about a mentally strained brute singlehandedly taking down a child prostitution ring while simultaneously uncovering a larger political conspiracy. Ramsay’s approach to violence is much less explicit & blunt than what’s delivered in Taxi Driver, though, obscuring its emotional release by instead focusing only on the violence’s anticipation & resulting aftermath, never the act itself. You Were Never Really Here’s artistic merits are found almost entirely in its editing room tinkering, searching for freshly upsetting ways to depict onscreen violence by both lingering on its brutality and removing all of its tangible payoff. It’s remarkably similar to the Psycho shower scene in that way, a connection acknowledged several times in the dialogue (thanks to serendipitous adlibbing from Dead Silence‘s Judith Roberts, who plays the would-be stand-in for Norman Bates’s mother in Ramsay’s film). If you’re looking for a prolonged echo of the bloody catharsis that concludes Taxi Driver you’re not likely to find it here, no matter how similar the two films might sound in concept.

Joaquin Phoenix stars as a mercenary muscle who specializes in rescuing underage girls from child prostitution rings. When this grueling job overlaps with a larger web of political intrigue involving a governor, a senator, and one particular underage victim, he suddenly finds himself alone in the world, attempting to take down an Evil force much larger than one man could possibly handle. He attacks this problem with brute strength by way of his peculiar weapon of choice, a ball peen hammer, but any minor successes he can achieve only open his life to more violent and emotional chaos. This one-dude-vs-a-human-trafficking-network narrative is now common enough to be its own genre, if not only through Liam Neeson’s recent catalog alone. Where films like Taken or Brawl in Cell Block 99 often feel like macho power fantasies, though, You Were Never Really Here shows little to no interest in offering any such release. Our broken macho man anti-hero cannot successfully beat his problems to pulp. Instead of making him come across like a heroic badass, his horrific line of work leaves him weeping, codependent with his elderly mother, and in desperate need of a kind stranger to hold his hand or kiss his cheek. Physical, masculine strength is a debilitating force for Evil in this picture. Our protagonist is haunted by past childhood, wartime, and occupational atrocities that we only glimpse in flashes, but leave him effectively crippled. In crime thriller terms, this is less the stylized romance of Drive than it is the dispiriting grime of Good Time. It resembles the skeletal structure of a Liam Neeson-starring Dadsploitation power fantasy, but its guts are all the emotional, gushy stuff most action films deliberately avoid. And because this is a Lynne Ramsay picture, those guts are laid out to rot & fester. We linger on her characters’ emotional pain without being offered any clear catharsis.

It never feels right to discuss a Lynn Ramsay film in terms of plot, since so much of her storytelling is paired own to elemental indulgences in imagery & sound. Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood enhances the film’s emotional discomfort with slightly off-rhythm guitars, violins, and percussions. Any visual information missing from the obscured bloody hammer attacks is supplanted with the menacing specificity of other off-kilter images: burning photographs, mouths sucking on thin plastic, bloody tissues piling on an office desk, sugar peeling off a crushed jellybean, etc. If the film draws an aesthetic comparison to another title in Ramsay’s (depressingly limited) filmography it’s Morvern Callar, her most strikingly grimy descent into emotional chaos to date. Not only does You Were Never Really Here share that film’s impossibly dark humor and (despite its absence of heavy Scottish accents) necessity for subtitles, it’s also at its core an editing room achievement in cinematic sight & sound. This may be Ramsay’s closest adherence to a genre structure to date, outweighing even the Bad Seed & Omen vibes of We Need to Talk About Kevin, but it’s deeply seated in the increasingly fractured mental space she’s been carving out as far back as Ratcatcher. The film’s security camera sequence is also her most impressively staged set piece outside the hellish house party that opens Morvern Callar, a very high bar to clear for any filmmaker. Whether you want to compare individual details from the film to Taken, Psycho, Taxi Driver, or any number of past stylized crime thrillers (Nocturama also comes to mind, based on the fractured imagery of its own security cam sequence), there’s no denying that this is pure Lynne Ramsay. The director obscures, subverts, deconstructs, and viciously tears apart a traditionally macho genre until its only viable comparison point is the furthest reaches of her own sublimely upsetting oeuvre.

-Brandon Ledet

Ratcatcher (1999)

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Finally catching up with the rest of Lynne Ramsay’s (tragically thin) catalog, after years of appreciating her breakout feature We Need to Talk About Kevin as one of the best films of the 2010s, has revealed an aspect of her work I did not expect would define her aesthetic: grime. You can catch a glimpse of the immersive filth & despair central to Ramsay’s work in the hypnotic tomato festival opening of We Need to Talk About Kevin, but it does not command the remainder of the picture in the way it does with her previous efforts. To that point, I’ve previously described her grief-rattled indie drama Morvern Callar as feeling “less like an original screenplay than it does like a feature adaptation of a crumpled-up Polaroid Ramsey found in a sewer.” To my naïve surprise, Ramsay’s debut film proved to be even grimier, sinking its yellowed teeth into the audience with a punishing immersion in dispiriting filth & despair to the point where the movie is explicitly about squalor. Ratcatcher is a nasty, unforgiving vision from a director who’s unafraid to lunge at her audience’s throat, a ferocious talent who’s been afforded too few opportunities to choke the life out of us & shove our face in the dirt. Weirdly enough, it’s also her most tender film to date, if not only for one brief gasp of lyricism that offers a rare fresh breath of escape.

Part of the reason the punishing grime of Ratchacher lands with such a convincing thud is that it’s used to detail the poverty-stricken lives of cinema’s most taboo targets: children. Telegraphing a kids-lyrically-transcending-their-grimy-environment genre that would eventually be solidified in titles like George Washington, Beasts of the Southern Wild, American Honey, and The Florida Project, Ratchacher mostly immerses its narrative in a community of disenfranchised children running wild in a rundown 1970s Glasgow tenement. Kids are interchangeable and, to some degree, disposable in this dilapidated environment, which lacks proper utilities like plumbing, hot water, trash service, etc. With the housing facilities condemned and the community being gradually transported to a new, plastic-wrapped tenement, one family waits for their turn to be transported as their neighbors disappear and the trash piles up. A roving gang of bullies beat the trash piles with sticks, looking for rats to kill, and treat fellow children with the same brutish curiosity. Cheap beer & television serve as minor escapist pleasures as the central family waits for things to get better. Their lives continue to rot instead. Grief over an early fatal mistake plagues the house just as much as the rats & stench of trash. The childhood play that fills the remaining days before the big move resembles murderous violence more each second.

Ratcatcher was met with enthusiastic festival circuit accolades, but saw no theatrical distribution before being acquired by Criterion for home release. It’s difficult to imagine the film being a commercial success even if it did reach a wide audience, though, even if marketed as a nasty punk version of Stand by Me. There is one lyrical sequence of mind-blowing sci-fi absurdity that completely distorts its stuck-in-squalor existentialism, but for the most part the film is relentlessly dour in a way that’s antithetical to the possibility of being a crowd-pleaser. The Scottish accents are so thick they almost require subtitles. Children smear each other in filth and call each other “fucking bastards” with alarming ferociousness. The few trips outside the squalid tenement setting is just an endless parade of uncollected, festering trash. Ratcatcher is the ultimate submersion in Lynne Ramsay’s auteurist vision of a grimy, unforgiving world. She may have since found a more propulsive, narrative-focused method of dragging audiences through these grime-coated environments, but making us sit in the filth to watch children rot was a hell of a way to start her career. It’s not surprising that when other directors followed with their own children-in-poverty narratives like Beasts of the Southern Wild, they decided to lean into the lyricism of the Ratcatcher’s sole moment of sci-fi escapism. The film that surrounds that moment is downright suffocating, admirably so.

-Brandon Ledet

Morvern Callar (2002)

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It’s a goddamn shame that in her two decades of directing features, Scottish auteur Lynne Ramsay has only been able to secure financing for four directorial efforts. What’s more of a personal shame for me is that I haven’t yet made a point to watch all of her available works. I’m in love with the darkly amusing, surrealist nightmare of 2011’s We Need to Talk About Kevin and her upcoming thriller You Were Never Really Here is my most anticipated film of 2018, but I’ve been slow to pull the trigger on her two earlier features until now, a grotesque oversight on my part. Speaking of grotesque, Ramsay’s precursor to We Need to Talk About Kevin is one of the grimier, more sickly features I can remember seeing in a long while. Morvern Callar feels less like an original screenplay than it does like a feature film adaptation of a crumpled-up Polaroid Ramsay found in a sewer. Along with a fearless performance from indie movie mainstay Samantha Morton, Ramsay’s direction & scum-coated visual language capture a very specific phase of soul-crushing grief: the stage where you stumble in total shock, only emerging from drunken stupors long enough to pray for the release of death. The film is nowhere near as satisfying as We Need to Talk About Kevin on a technical or narrative level, but stylistically speaking it’s just as powerful & willing to lunge directly at the audience’s throat, a visual ferociousness I can’t help but appreciate.

Morton stars as the titular Morvern Callar, a twenty-something party animal who awakes from a blackout to discover her boyfriend dead from suicide. As Morvern ponders her plight in the sad glow of their shared apartment’s blinking Christmas lights, the movie threatens to sink into the slow, grainy quiet of a Kelly Reichardt film. That quiet, reflective gloom does not last long. Morvern’s response to her boyfriend’s death is much more akin to the behavior of a raccoon or an opossum than it is to a human being. She allows his body to rot on the floor for days before deciding to chop it up & bury it, keeping the funeral money he left behind for herself & selling his novel manuscript to a publisher under her own name. She uses the resulting cash flow to fill her days with hedonistic distractions: drugs, parties, vacations with her bestie, bad sex. The whole movie dwells in a kind of desperate attempt at fun! meant to hold her grief at bay, as she keeps the opening tragedy to herself as a secret. I’m not sure this nightmare vision of grief & desperate distraction is ever as strong as it is in the first party she attends almost immediately after discovering her boyfriend’s body. A disorienting mosaic of dancing, fire, broken glass, and drug-rotted sex, the earliest party sequence dunks the audience’s head in ice cold water as an open, honest threat about the meaningless debauchery to come. Morton barrels through it all with a nasty, heartbroken fervor and Ramsay matches her feral energy with an appropriately devastating sense of grime.

I can’t honestly say that Morvern Callar sustains the brutal intensity of that initial party sequence for its entire runtime, but it’s never dull or dispirited. The film plays like an pus-infected inversion of Eat, Pray, Love, with Morvern attempting to transform into a different person through self-indulgence & travel. Instead of “finding herself,” however, she’s more attempting to lose herself. For her part, Ramsay never loses track of the grief or desperation at the center of this quest, but she does often threaten to make it look cool. An incredible soundtrack stacked with some of the greatest pop acts of all time (Broadcast, Stereolab, Velvet Underground, Ween, etc.) combines with intensely colored lights & grimy punk energy to almost estimate the dressed-down chic of a fashion shoot or a music video. Ramsay’s sensibilities are too stomach-turning & sorrowful for Morvern Callar to fully tip in that that direction, though, and the movie ultimately comes across as incredibly sad. It’s the same odd balance she struck in We Need to Talk About Kevin, a tone she collaboratively establishes through heartbreaking performances from Samantha Morton & Tilda Swinton, respectively. I’m excited to see how that tonal tightrope is managed in the rest of her work, but saddened to know it won’t take much effort for me to fully find out.

-Brandon Ledet