Director Lynne Ramsay has an incredible ability to dig deep into the darkness of troubled psyches and stay there for hours, more sketching the details than seeking some prized answer to everything. Die My Love plunges into the messy mindset of a rural woman with few avenues of support. The loneliness of the simple life is portrayed as far more than a longing gaze out the window, but a bitter desire to revert to the primal.

Commanding this tricky performance is Jennifer Lawrence in one of her finest roles as the multi-faceted and faulty Grace. Her relationship with Jackson (Robert Pattinson) leads to them buying his family’s old rural home, a move that is initially met with loud excitement and exciting sex. But it’s all downhill for Grace from here on out, as Jackson’s work keeps him far away, leaving her quietly distraught over her situation. Nothing seems to satisfy her enough to return to her work of writing, and caring for her baby offers little fulfillment. Further flustering comes when Jackson brings home a dog that Grace despises as much as the docile house she must reside in. There is no comfort here. It’s either the discomforting silence of parenthood or the cloying conversations of the few surrounding moms.

The film mercifully sidesteps any storytelling that presents a prescriptive path to resolve Grace’s empty nature as a lonely mother or the past trauma that has made her mind deteriorate further. There’s a very telling scene after Grace is checked into a mental hospital, and she is questioned about the relationship with her baby. Grace snaps that the baby was never a problem; it’s everything else. Some come close to sympathizing with Grace, as with Pam (Sissy Spacek), but there’s only so much that can be given, where a sympathetic ear and recommendations of yoga can only go so far. Even an affair with the desirable Karl (LaKeith Stanfield) doesn’t go anywhere beyond satisfying a few urges for a short time, and a ghostly visit by Jackson’s dead relative Harry (Nick Nolte) offers no comfort beyond an assurance that you can give up.

Ramsay makes the film as scattered and uneven as Grace’s life, which surprisingly works for steering Lawrence towards the avant-garde. Grace’s moods fluctuate between being furious at Jackson in a heated fight and being playfully horny as she treats a condom in the car like a balloon. The nonlinear format reveals more about this character and shoots down any easy assessments of where her life went wrong. It’d be easy to declare that everything went awry when she moved into a house in the middle of nowhere, but as the early wedding scenes reveal, there were problems from the start. There’s a desperation for answers as a distraught woman seeks help, yet can’t be heard in the thick haze of rural life. So she screams and gnashes her teeth in her own primal way, where acts of sex in the car, barking at dogs, and making a mess of the bathroom do little to satiate an unsatisfied life.

Die My Love takes some risky swings but ultimately pays off with a raw and refreshing performance by Jennifer Lawrence. Many scenes feel like an exercise in the experimental, especially in how the film favors quick cutting in nonlinear sequences to stress the racing memories and madness of it all. But for rarely arriving at something simple to blame or a road to recovery, there’s a more honest air of trying to relate to someone who feels like they can relate to nothing. This is not a film that wants the audience to find the keys to unlocking Grace’s mind, but rather an attempt to understand someone who has lost the will to make sense of anything, with her hills and valleys of a chaotic mental landscape. The problem for Grace isn’t as easily diagnosed as a bad home, decaying marriage, isolating parenthood, or unresolved childhood trauma; it’s all of that and more, where no amount of time committed or breaks from routine will repair her shattered mental state. Sometimes, all you can do is listen to the noise to drown out the dread, and Ramsay’s film mostly works for wanting us to join Grace in her clawing for the last drop of dopamine, trying to see ourselves in the mess of toothpaste she smears on the bathroom floor.

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