Die My Love

The film leads us through this slow slide into chaos—among crackling woods, dreams, and ragged breaths: a nature that seems to want to speak to her, and a woman who, clearly, has had enough. Grace drags herself, walks on all fours, howls, drools, turns animal—and she does so for about two hours, just so we don’t forget that “the human being is also instinct,” a message the film repeats like an obsessive mantra, for fear someone might have missed it the first time.

Ah, Die My Love. Two words that sound like a promise of cosmic pathos and instead… here are two hours of hypnotic boredom, punctuated by grunts, crawling, and vacant stares. Ramsay, with all her authorial will, invites us to contemplate her protagonist’s slow mental dissolution—but she does it without style, save for the urge to shock, and with the repetitiveness of someone who doesn’t know what else to invent.

Every scene seems bent on reminding us that the protagonist is “animal,” “wild,” “uncontrollable,” but by insisting so much, the film ends up chasing its own tail—like a dog that’s lost the bone of its plot. And when the moment finally comes in which Grace decides the world can go ahead and end—that it’s better to burn in the forest than survive the boredom of herself—well, the déjà vu is complete. There’s even a wedding! Yes, because we’ve already seen the existential apocalypse of a desperate woman who wants to dissolve into the universe—in the unforgettable, unsurpassable Melancholia, precisely. There, von Trier made planets collapse with sublime aesthetics; here, Ramsay bares a body and sets a forest ablaze, and that’s about it…

You’d say the director wanted to mix the self-destructive ecstasy of Nymphomaniac with the apocalyptic catastrophe of Melancholia. The result, though, is a film that fancies itself a psychological experiment but is in fact a long exercise in style in search of meaning. Postpartum drama becomes a pretext for endless shots of trees, shadows, and breathing; a cinema that wants to tell us “look how the contemporary woman suffers,” but ends up making, more modestly, the viewer suffer.

And thank goodness the child doesn’t die—otherwise we’d have strayed into Antichrist as well, and that really would have been too much: the inadvertent trilogy of total emulation.

In the end, Die My Love proves that walking on all fours, panting, or burning in a symbolic fire does not suffice to be profound. You need a vision. Above all, you need to know when to stop. Ramsay, unfortunately, doesn’t stop: she persists, hammers away, self-hypnotizes in her poetics of suffering, convinced she’s reinventing female pain. But the result is a film that seems to want to say too much and ends up always saying the same thing.

Never imitate a genius if you’re not prepared to be at least a little bit ingenious yourself. Modesty is required, dear Ramsay—and despite We Need to Talk About Kevin, you don’t become Lars von Trier by crawling through the mud on all fours.

Trying to be Lars von Trier is like wanting to paint with Caravaggio’s light without knowing his darkness.

 — William Ralph Inge