Most actors would probably think twice before smashing through a glass door or ramming their head into a mirror. For Jennifer Lawrence, though, that’s just another day at work. In her upcoming film Die My Love, set to hit theaters November 7, Lawrence dives into a wild, emotional, and deeply unsettling performance as Grace — a young mother drowning in postpartum depression, isolation, and the suffocating silence of rural life. The film, which also stars Robert Pattinson as her partner Jackson, is a gut-wrenching psychological drama that showcases Lawrence at her most fearless and feral.
Grace’s life in Die My Love feels like a slow implosion. On the surface, she appears to be living the dream — a quiet home in the countryside with her husband and child. But beneath that calm is a woman unraveling in silence, desperate to feel anything again. The film doesn’t shy away from her self-destructive impulses. In one shocking moment, Grace smashes her head into a mirror. In another, she tears through wallpaper, destroys furniture, and even crashes a car while taunting her inattentive partner with a condom. It’s brutal and unfiltered, and yet Lawrence insists there’s a strange kind of freedom in it.
“Everybody’s like, ‘Oh, my God, it must be so hard!’” she said during an interview in New York, sitting next to Pattinson in a cozy Midtown hotel. “The reality is, it’s actually really fun because none of the consequences in the script are real to my life. I get to call up that energy and adrenaline, and then they call ‘cut,’ and I just get a high. I get to live those intrusive thoughts out loud.”
That honesty — the ability to admit that she finds catharsis in chaos — is what has always made Lawrence stand out. She has built her career on a mix of raw vulnerability and natural humor, and in Die My Love, that balance is pushed to its emotional limit. Grace is not a character built for sympathy; she’s messy, angry, sometimes unlikable, and often frighteningly real.
The film is based on Ariana Harwicz’s 2017 novel of the same name, a poetic yet harrowing look at a woman slipping into postpartum depression. Director Lynne Ramsay, known for her emotionally charged style, adapted the book with Lawrence and Pattinson in mind. The story, Ramsay has said, isn’t about villainy or madness — it’s about what happens when someone is left unseen for too long.
Lawrence first encountered Harwicz’s novel at the suggestion of Martin Scorsese, who also serves as one of the film’s producers. The book immediately reminded her of John Cassavetes’ 1974 masterpiece A Woman Under the Influence, starring Gena Rowlands. “The way it built this psychological experience, it’s almost like you could see inside the heart and mind of Gena Rowlands,” Lawrence said. “It was so raw, so invasive in a way that felt honest. That’s what I wanted for Grace.”
In the film, Jackson — played with quiet restraint by Pattinson — is a partner who doesn’t quite know how to handle Grace’s spiral. He’s distant, confused, and often away from home, which fuels Grace’s paranoia and resentment. While she suspects he’s cheating, she also begins to develop her own fixation on a mysterious motorcyclist played by LaKeith Stanfield. It’s a relationship dynamic that’s as suffocating as it is believable, and Pattinson said he appreciated Ramsay’s willingness to humanize Jackson.
“In the book, he’s more of a device for her; he’s really like a shadow person,” Pattinson explained. “But the more I was reading, I was like, ‘You can be a bad person for someone else without necessarily being a bad person.’” That complexity — the gray area where love and damage coexist — is what gives the movie its weight.
In many ways, Die My Love is a mirror reflecting the conversations that modern culture is only now beginning to have about motherhood. It’s part of a wave of recent films — including One Battle After Another, The Testament of Ann Lee, and Hamnet — that explore the mental, emotional, and physical tolls of motherhood, and the fear of losing oneself in the process. Lawrence believes that’s no coincidence. “It probably has something to do with the fact that postpartum is finally spoken about in our culture,” she said. “Now that we know to medicate for it and ask about it, then it makes sense that it would seep into the artistic conversations.”
For Lawrence, this subject hits close to home. She has a three-year-old son, Cy, with her husband, art gallerist Cooke Maroney, and earlier this year, the couple welcomed their second child. She said her own experiences as a mother helped her understand Grace’s pain, even if she’s never felt it to the same extreme. Pattinson, who has an 18-month-old daughter with his partner, singer and actress Suki Waterhouse, also drew from his new reality as a parent.
Those experiences, they both agreed, gave authenticity to their performances — especially in scenes depicting the tension between Grace and Jackson as parents. While Harwicz’s novel portrays them as largely neglectful, Lawrence wanted the film to add emotional depth, showing that these two people care deeply for their child but are drowning under the pressure of it all. “The misunderstanding about postpartum is that you don’t connect with your kid and you don’t like your kid,” Lawrence said. “What often happens is both parents love the child so much that you end up resenting each other because the child is the only perfect thing in the relationship. It’s such an intense thing to disagree on.”
Then she smiled and added with her usual self-deprecating humor, “I mean, before we had kids, what would we disagree with our partners about? Where to go to dinner and who said what during an argument? When you disagree about what’s best for your child, that’s a real serious, scary fight.”
That blend of warmth and honesty is what keeps her grounded, even when portraying a character as unhinged as Grace. Despite the film’s heavy subject matter, the energy on set wasn’t nearly as dark. Lawrence and Pattinson developed an easygoing friendship that helped them navigate the intensity of their scenes together.
The morning after Halloween, Lawrence was still laughing about taking Cy trick-or-treating. “He wanted to be a traffic light,” she said, rolling her eyes playfully. “He wore it for like ten minutes before deciding he was done. I was like, ‘Cool, I only spent months working on your costume, but sure, let’s go home!’”
She teased Pattinson about his habit of randomly FaceTiming people. “He thinks he’s Gen Z,” she joked. Pattinson laughed, shaking his head, and returned the compliment, calling her one of the most spontaneous actors he’s ever worked with. “It’s very strange to see how you work,” he said. “I was always very impressed with how you can just turn it on. Your ability to come up with stuff on the fly is insane.”
Their dynamic on set was a mix of respect and mischief. Lawrence admitted she sometimes tried to “sabotage” Pattinson before emotional scenes by getting the “church giggles,” the kind of uncontrollable laughter that comes out of nowhere. “It’s like, we’re about to shoot this devastating argument, and I’ll just start laughing for no reason,” she said. “It’s terrible but also kind of necessary, because it breaks the tension.”
Filming took place in Calgary, Alberta, last summer. The setting — vast countryside, quiet mornings, endless skies — served as both a beautiful and isolating backdrop for the story. Despite the dark tone of the film, Pattinson recalled the experience with surprising fondness. “The baby was like this funny little potato; she was so young at the time,” he said, smiling as he talked about his daughter. “It was a very, very lovely period. And just being in the countryside, looking at beautiful sunrises all the time — it was very idyllic.”
Lawrence’s family was with her throughout production. Pregnant with her second child at the time, she said having her husband and son around helped her separate Jennifer from Grace. “I snap in and out of it on set,” she said. “Cy just got used to me having blood on my face, and he loved to sit on LaKeith’s motorcycle. My husband and my son would be playing with the motorcycle, and that was the ‘affair motorcycle.’ My family is just like, ‘Cheers!’ and ‘Cheese!’ and playing on it. I always thought that was so funny.”
That lightheartedness kept her anchored, even as she explored Grace’s darkest corners. “I never felt like I was bringing her home with me,” Lawrence said. “Once I leave set, she stays there. My family’s energy just wipes it all away.”
For Lawrence, the project marks something of a comeback to the kind of serious, emotionally complex roles that first put her on the map. After years of blockbuster franchises and high-profile projects, she’s back in the awards conversation for the first time in a decade. Her last major win was the 2012 Academy Award for Silver Linings Playbook, a role that also explored mental health with raw vulnerability.
Now 35, she seems more confident than ever in her choices. Die My Love is risky — it’s not a crowd-pleaser, and it doesn’t offer easy answers. But that’s what drew her in. “It’s like a release,” she said. “Grace is chaos. But through her, I got to explore everything that scares me — and walk away from it.”
Pattinson, who has spent the last few years reinventing himself through complex characters in The Batman and The Lighthouse, echoed that sentiment. “It’s not often that you get to be in a film that feels like a psychological storm but is made with so much empathy,” he said. “It’s not trying to diagnose anyone; it’s just saying, ‘This is what it feels like to be human when things fall apart.’”
And that, ultimately, is what makes Die My Love such a striking experience. It doesn’t try to sugarcoat the pain of motherhood or the isolation of mental illness. Instead, it lets those feelings breathe, twist, and sometimes suffocate — but always in a way that feels painfully real. Grace’s story isn’t just about despair; it’s also about the desperate need to be seen, to be understood, to feel alive again.
For Lawrence, that journey — both on screen and off — has been about reclaiming her own artistic instincts. After years of public scrutiny and the pressure of fame, she seems to have found a new rhythm: one that balances career, motherhood, and a renewed sense of creative freedom.
“I’m in a place where I only want to do things that move me,” she said. “I don’t care about the noise anymore. I just care about stories that make me feel something — and Die My Love did that immediately.”
There’s a strange poetry in watching an actress like Lawrence — who has spent much of her career being celebrated for her control, her composure, her charm — surrender so completely to chaos. Her Grace is unfiltered and unapologetic, a woman trapped between rage and love, desire and guilt, all while trying to remember who she was before she became someone’s mother, someone’s wife, someone else’s reflection.
And through all that turmoil, Lawrence finds something resembling truth. It’s messy, it’s uncomfortable, and it’s beautiful — just like life itself.
Die My Love may not be the kind of movie that everyone can watch easily. But for those who do, it’s a reminder that motherhood isn’t a single story — it’s a thousand emotions crashing at once, and sometimes, the bravest thing you can do is simply admit you’re drowning.
Jennifer Lawrence, once again, proves she’s not afraid to dive in headfirst. Even if it means breaking a few mirrors along the way.