Die, My Love
How a Book Club, a Star, and a Risk-Taking Director Created 2025’s Most Dangerous Film
By Stephen Cyrus Sepher
It began quietly, with a book. Not a pitch meeting or a studio deal, but a simple act of curiosity. Martin Scorsese was reading Ariana Harwicz’s novel Matate, Amor, a fever dream about motherhood, isolation, and desire. The story was too raw to ignore. He finished it and sent it to Jennifer Lawrence with a note that said she might find something inside it. She did.
That moment became the origin of Die, My Love, a film that would later divide critics and audiences, receive a nine-minute standing ovation at Cannes, and remind the industry what courage still looks like on screen.
The Spark
Scorsese was more than a name on the credits. He was the match that lit the fuse. Through his company Sikelia Productions he passed the novel to Lawrence and her producing partner Justine Ciarrocchi at Excellent Cadaver. Lawrence read it and felt its pulse immediately.
The story followed a woman in rural isolation descending into madness after childbirth. It terrified her and fascinated her at the same time. Lawrence wanted to do it, but she also wanted to produce it. She wanted control over how the story would be told.
She and Ciarrocchi reached out to Lynne Ramsay, the director who had already shown the world what it means to turn pain into poetry. Ramsay had explored trauma before in We Need to Talk About Kevin and You Were Never Really Here. At first she hesitated. Then she reframed it. This would not be a story about mental illness. It would be a story about love pushed past its breaking point.
From that moment, the film had a heartbeat.
The Architecture
To bring it to life, the team needed more than vision. They needed the right foundation. That came from Black Label Media, the company founded by Molly Smith and Trent and Thad Luckinbill. Black Label had already built a reputation for balancing art and commerce with films like Sicario, La La Land, and Only the Brave.
They financed the film and gave Ramsay full creative control. Shooting on 35 millimeter film. Using the 1.33 Academy ratio. Embracing a story about postpartum psychosis that no major studio would risk. It was an act of trust that allowed Ramsay to build the film she wanted rather than the film the market demanded.
Andrea Calderwood, known for The Last King of Scotland, joined as producer, adding experience in international production. Scorsese’s name as executive producer added cultural weight and helped the film find distribution through MUBI.
By the end of 2023, the pieces were in place. Lawrence would star and produce. Ramsay would direct. Black Label would finance. Scorsese would stand behind it. Together they built a creative ecosystem that could sustain the risks that were coming.
The Vision
Lynne Ramsay makes films that do not explain. They immerse.
For Die, My Love, she shot on 35 millimeter to preserve the imperfections of light and skin. The almost square 1.33 frame creates a sense of entrapment. Every wall feels closer. Every doorway seems too narrow to escape. Working again with cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, Ramsay turned domestic space into a psychological cage.
The camera does not observe Grace. It becomes her.
Ramsay called the film a comedy and a love story, but in her words, her kind of comedy and her kind of love story, which means it is beautiful and violent at once.
She worked with writers Enda Walsh and Alice Birch to adapt the novel into something fragmented and alive. The film moves like memory rather than chronology. Editor Toni Froschhammer shaped the rhythm to feel like a panic attack: quick, uneven, then suddenly still.
Sound designer Paul Davies and composer Ben Frost filled the silence with unease. The noise of a refrigerator, the creak of a floorboard, a faint breath in another room. Every sound is a reminder that the world around Grace is alive even when she is not.
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The Production
Filming began in Calgary in August 2024 and lasted for eight weeks. Ramsay built the shoot around intuition. Dialogue was constantly rewritten or stripped away. The actors were encouraged to use movement instead of words.
She and McGarvey used long, static hallway shots framed through multiple doorways. The repetition of these compositions creates the feeling of a mind caught in a loop. Ramsay also used mixed film stocks to mirror emotional texture. Softer daylight tones for moments of calm. Grainy, darker stock for disintegration.
In post-production, the editing and sound design became a continuation of the performance. The film never lets you rest. Even moments of stillness feel charged.
The Performers
For Jennifer Lawrence, this was the role she had been waiting for. She said becoming a mother changed how she understood loneliness, and that understanding drove her performance. She plays Grace as both predator and victim, terrified and defiant at once.
Lawrence was not only the lead but also the producer. The story was hers to shape. Her presence on set became a balance between performer and protector, ensuring Ramsay’s vision stayed intact.
Robert Pattinson joined the cast because he wanted to explore helplessness rather than heroism. He plays Jackson, a husband who loves deeply but cannot save. He said it felt like drowning beside someone you love.
Before shooting, Ramsay made Lawrence and Pattinson rehearse through movement. They performed a full interpretive dance, naked and unguarded, to dissolve the boundary between performance and presence. They later joked about it, but that exercise created a vulnerability that lives in every frame.
The supporting cast, including LaKeith Stanfield, Sissy Spacek, and Nick Nolte, give the world around Grace a quiet gravity. They are witnesses rather than saviors.
The Risk
In 2025, a film like Die, My Love should not exist. It cost around twenty million dollars. It has no franchise, no formula, and no promise of comfort. It is a story about motherhood, rage, and the limits of love.
Yet it exists because the people behind it believed that cinema can still be dangerous. Scorsese provided the vision that began it. Lawrence brought her star power and her creative authority. Black Label Media brought the infrastructure that made it financially real. Ramsay brought the fearlessness that made it unforgettable.
At Cannes, the film premiered to a standing ovation that lasted nearly ten minutes. Critics called it unflinching, divisive, and essential. Some said it was too much. Ramsay would call that success.
What It Says
Die, My Love is not about madness. It is about the fine line between devotion and destruction. It is about what happens when the person you love becomes the mirror you can no longer look into.
It is also about filmmaking itself. What happens when artists, producers, and financiers agree that truth is more valuable than safety.
A book sparked a conversation. A conversation built a belief. That belief became one of the most arresting films of the decade.
That is what happens when courage meets art and refuses to look away.
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