📋 In This Article
- How It Started: Martin Scorsese’s Book Club and the Call That Changed Everything
- Die My Love — The Film at a Glance
- Full Cast: Lawrence, Pattinson, Spacek, Nolte, Stanfield
- What the Film Is Actually About
- Lynne Ramsay: The Director Who Refused the Label
- Cannes 2025: The Six-Minute Standing Ovation and the $24M Deal
- On Set: 35mm Film, Calgary, and Lawrence Filming at Four Months Pregnant
- The Festival Run — San Sebastián Donostia Award, BFI London, Rome, Stockholm
- Theatrical Release, Box Office, and the CinemaScore That Tells a Story
- Critical Reception: RT 74%, Metacritic 72, and the Divided Audience
- Ariana Harwicz and the Novel: What the Book Is and How It Changed
- Awards Season — What Lawrence Has Won and What’s Still Possible
- FAQs
In 2022, Martin Scorsese finished a novel in his private book club with other filmmakers and immediately sent it to Jennifer Lawrence. That act of literary recommendation set in motion one of the most anticipated productions of the decade: a Lynne Ramsay film starring Lawrence and Robert Pattinson in their first-ever collaboration, financed by Black Label Media, produced by Scorsese’s own Sikelia Productions, and sold at Cannes for the biggest deal the festival produced in 2025.
Die My Love opened on May 17, 2025 at the Cannes Film Festival in competition for the Palme d’Or, received a six-minute standing ovation, and was acquired by MUBI the same day for $24 million — the largest deal in MUBI’s history and the largest sale at Cannes 2025. It reached American cinemas on November 7, grossed $11.9 million worldwide, began streaming on MUBI on December 23, and has been generating the kind of persistent, fractured conversation that most films only dream of. Jennifer Lawrence Die My Love is, by any measure, the most singular thing either of its stars has done. Here is the complete account of what it is, how it was made, and what it means.
★ Where It All Started — A Book Club, a Phone Call, and Three Years of Development
How It Started: Martin Scorsese’s Book Club and the Call That Changed Everything
Ariana Harwicz’s 2012 novel Die, My Love — originally published in Spanish as Mátate, amor — had been circulating in literary circles for years before it reached Scorsese. He runs a private book club with other filmmakers, and when he finished the novel he immediately sent it to Jennifer Lawrence and her producing partner Justine Ciarrocchi at Excellent Cadaver, their production company. His message, in essence, was: this is you.
Lawrence read it and agreed. She and Scorsese had previously been in discussions about adapting Kate Chopin’s 1899 novel The Awakening — a story of female liberation and self-destruction in 19th-century Louisiana — but when Harwicz’s book arrived, they decided it presented a more contemporary, more uncompromising version of the same fundamental experience. In November 2022, Lawrence confirmed she would star in the film. Scorsese would produce through Sikelia Productions alongside Lawrence, Ciarrocchi, Black Label Media’s Thad and Trent Luckinbill, Andrea Calderwood, and Molly Smith.
Finding the right director took longer. Lawrence sent the book to Lynne Ramsay. Ramsay’s instinct was to decline — she had already explored motherhood, violence, and psychological rupture with We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011), and the thematic territory felt too familiar. But the specific texture of Harwicz’s prose, and the way Lawrence described wanting to approach it, changed her mind. Ramsay came on board and began co-writing the screenplay with playwright Enda Walsh and screenwriter Alice Birch. Three writers, over three years of development, to arrive at what Ramsay describes as a film about “a relationship breaking down, love breaking down, and sex breaking down after having a baby. And it’s also about a creative block.”
★ Everything at a Glance
Die My Love (2025) — The Film at a Glance
Die My Love (2025)
Production companies: Excellent Cadaver (Lawrence/Ciarrocchi), Black Label Media (financing), Sikelia Productions (Scorsese).
Setting: Rural Montana. A young couple — Grace and Jackson — have left New York City and moved to Jackson’s inherited family home in the countryside to raise their newborn son. The wide, empty landscape is both the setting and the metaphor.
★ Everyone in the Film — With Context
Full Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Pattinson, Sissy Spacek, Nick Nolte, LaKeith Stanfield
★ What Actually Happens — Without Spoiling Everything
What Die My Love Is Actually About
Grace (Lawrence) and Jackson (Pattinson) have left New York — their careers, their friends, their city selves — and moved to Jackson’s inherited family house in the Montana countryside to raise their newborn son. The plan was simplicity. What arrives instead is something that resists any single clinical label.
Grace is a writer who cannot write. She is a mother who cannot simply be a mother. She is a wife to a man who disappears on mysterious errands and whose calm in the face of her escalating internal weather becomes, as the film progresses, indistinguishable from abandonment. The landscape — wide, cold, and indifferent — has nothing to absorb her energy. So it turns inward.
What follows is told almost entirely from inside Grace’s perspective: her impulses, her fantasies, her sudden violence, her moments of tenderness that arrive without warning and leave just as fast. The film does not follow a linear narrative arc so much as it follows the shape of a psyche under pressure. There are moments of genuine humour — Ramsay has described the film as “really fucking funny,” and she is not wrong — interspersed with sequences of such raw, physical distress that audiences at Cannes reportedly sat in silence during the credits.
Ramsay has been categorical about what the film is not about. It is not, she insists, a postpartum depression drama, despite the obvious trigger for Grace’s deterioration.
★ The Director — Every Ramsay Film, and Why She Almost Didn’t Make This One
Lynne Ramsay: The Director Who Refused the Label
🎬 Lynne Ramsay’s Filmography — Every Feature
Ratcatcher (1999): Un Certain Regard at Cannes. A boy navigates a rat-infested Glasgow housing estate during a dustman’s strike. Still considered one of the greatest British films of the 1990s.
Morvern Callar (2002): Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes. Samantha Morton wakes up next to her boyfriend’s dead body on Christmas morning and makes a series of inexplicable decisions. Deeply strange and deeply moving.
We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011): In competition at Cannes. Tilda Swinton as the mother of a school shooter, processing guilt and grief. BAFTA nominations, critical acclaim, and the reason Ramsay initially hesitated to make Die My Love.
You Were Never Really Here (2017): In competition at Cannes. Won Best Screenplay and Best Actor (Joaquin Phoenix). A traumatised hitman rescues children from trafficking networks. Intense, elliptical, and extremely violent.
Die My Love (2025): In competition at Cannes. See above.
Pattern: Every one of Ramsay’s five feature films has premiered at Cannes. Every single one. She makes a film roughly every five years. Every film is an adaptation of an existing literary work. Every film centres on a character experiencing dissociation, violence, or radical psychological instability. She is, by any measure, one of the most consistent and uncompromising filmmakers working today.
★ Cannes 2025 — The Standing Ovation and the Record Deal
Cannes 2025: Six Minutes, $24 Million, and the Film’s First Test
Die My Love had its world premiere on May 17, 2025 in the main competition at the 78th Cannes Film Festival. The reaction was immediate: a six-minute standing ovation in the Palais des Festivals. Deadline’s Damon Wise, reviewing from Cannes, called it “a brutal but beautiful story of a married woman’s mental disintegration” and suggested Lawrence’s performance might be a career best and could land her a fifth Oscar nomination.
MUBI moved before the festival day was over. The streaming platform — which has established itself as the prestige arthouse distributor of choice, home to films from Ramsay, Pedro Almodóvar, and Park Chan-wook — acquired Die My Love in an intense bidding war for $24 million. The figure represents the largest acquisition deal in MUBI’s history and was the biggest sale of the entire 2025 Cannes Film Festival. MUBI acquired rights for the United States, UK and Ireland, Latin America, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Benelux, Turkey, India, and Australia and New Zealand — effectively the film’s entire commercial territory outside France and select Asian markets.
The Palme d’Or went to Iranian director Jafar Panahi for It Was Just an Accident. Die My Love left Cannes without a prize but with something arguably more commercially significant: a $24 million distribution guarantee, a standing ovation on the record, and a reputation as the most talked-about film of the festival.
★ On Set — 35mm, Calgary, and a Pregnant Lead
On Set: 35mm Film, Calgary, and Jennifer Lawrence Filming at Four Months Pregnant
Principal photography ran from August to mid-October 2024, shot in and around Calgary, Canada, on 35mm film. Cinematographer Seamus McGarvey — who previously shot Atonement, Avengers: Age of Ultron, and Anna Karenina — was hired in part for his facility with 35mm’s particular grain and texture, which Ramsay wanted to give the film a physical, analogue quality distinct from digital’s smoothness.
Jennifer Lawrence was four and a half months pregnant with her second child when production began. It was a conscious decision not to delay. Lawrence said in interviews that being pregnant while playing Grace created unexpected advantages: the hormones of pregnancy were giving her “great” emotional states, and the only way she could “dip into this emotion” — Grace’s specific mixture of rage, desire, and dissolution — was from a position of personal stability. She needed the contrast to find the character.
Robert Pattinson described the working environment in terms that have become the most-quoted descriptions of Ramsay’s on-set method. He recalled arriving for a scene with three or four pages of scripted dialogue to discover that Ramsay had decided, that morning, to shoot it in silence. He also described his anxiety about the film’s big dance sequence — an improvised pas de deux that he took weeks of dance classes to prepare for, only to find that Ramsay had no intention of choreographing it or letting him perform the practised version.
The film was re-edited after its Cannes screening — an unusual but not unprecedented step that Ramsay has taken with previous films. The version that arrived in American cinemas on November 7, 2025 was different from the Cannes cut in pacing and certain structural choices. Whether this helped or hurt the film’s divisive critical reception is a question without a clean answer.
★ The Full Festival Circuit After Cannes
The Festival Run: Donostia Award, BFI London, Rome, Stockholm
★ The Numbers — And What the CinemaScore Means
Theatrical Release, Box Office, and the CinemaScore That Tells a Story
Die My Love opened in 1,983 US theaters on November 7, 2025, taking $2.6 million in its opening weekend. For context: this is the best opening weekend of Lynne Ramsay’s career. You Were Never Really Here, her previous film, had opened to $1.4 million in a fraction of the theaters. The wide release — an unusual gamble for a film of this type — was MUBI’s statement of confidence in Thornton’s commercial profile.
The CinemaScore of D+ is the most revealing single data point about the film’s relationship with general audiences. CinemaScore polls opening-night moviegoers — the people most likely to be fans of the stars or the genre — and a D+ means that even among self-selecting enthusiasts, the film did not deliver what they expected. This is not necessarily a negative artistic verdict. mother! (Darren Aronofsky, 2017) received an F from CinemaScore and is now widely regarded as one of the most significant films of that decade. Die My Love is fishing in the same waters: films that ask more of their audience than their audience came prepared to give.
★ What Critics Said — The Full Picture
Critical Reception: 74% on Rotten Tomatoes, 72 on Metacritic — and a Divided Audience
The Rotten Tomatoes consensus — “A frenzied depiction of a common but oft-ignored experience, Die My Love might be too stylistically mannered to fully connect but gifts Jennifer Lawrence with one of her most vivid roles yet” — captures the split at the heart of the critical response. Almost no one disputes Lawrence’s performance. The debate is about whether the film around her is worthy of it.
At the positive end, Deadline’s Damon Wise, reviewing from Cannes, called Lawrence’s performance a potential career best and described the film as deserving of an Academy Award for her. The Observer’s Mark Kermode described it as “unrelenting, fiercely committed filmmaking” and praised Ramsay’s capacity to put the audience inside psychological deterioration rather than observing it clinically. Variety’s Peter Debruge noted that the film “captures what it feels like when new motherhood disrupts all aspects of a woman’s sense of self in ways male-dominated cinema has rarely attempted to show.”
At the more critical end, The Atlantic’s David Sims argued that the film’s stylistic mannering — its elliptical structure, its refusal of cause and effect — creates beautiful individual sequences without building toward anything that earns them. Several reviewers noted that the CinemaScore D+ was not just an audience-taste verdict but reflected a film that genuinely does not meet viewers in the middle: it demands that you come to it.
The IMDb score of 6.1 — significantly lower than the professional critical consensus — tells its own story. Audiences who came for a Jennifer Lawrence thriller or a postpartum-depression drama and found something more destabilising expressed their reaction in the ratings. Audiences who came for exactly what Ramsay delivers gave it some of the highest user scores the film received anywhere.
★ The Source Material — A Novel That Changed How Motherhood Is Written
Ariana Harwicz and the Novel: What the Book Is and How It Changed
Ariana Harwicz is an Argentine novelist and playwright born in Buenos Aires and based in France. Mátate, amor (translated into English as Die, My Love) was published in 2012. The English translation — by Carolina Orloff and Sarah Moses — was published by Charco Press in 2017. The New Yorker, reviewing the English translation, characterised it as part of the “motherhood horror” genre alongside works by Rachel Cusk and Jenny Offill.
Harwicz’s novel is set in the French countryside. Ramsay moved the story to the rural American West — specifically to Montana, Jackson’s inherited family home — giving the isolation a different quality: more mythic, more cinematically legible, and more American in its particular flavour of loneliness. The unnamed protagonist of the novel became Grace in the film; her unnamed partner became Jackson. LaKeith Stanfield’s Karl is a significant addition who does not appear in the novel in the same form.
Harwicz approved of the adaptation. Her own view of the novel has always been that its subject is not postpartum depression — a framing she finds reductive — but rather the incompatibility between female desire and social expectation. In this, she and Ramsay are entirely in agreement, which is one reason the adaptation works as well as it does despite the significant changes of setting and character.
★ Awards Season — What She’s Won, What She’s Nominated For
Awards Season for Jennifer Lawrence — Donostia Award, Oscar Conversation, and What’s Confirmed
| Award / Recognition | Category | Result |
|---|---|---|
| San Sebastián International Film Festival | Donostia Award (Honorary Career Award) | Won — September 2025 |
| Cannes Film Festival 2025 | Palme d’Or (Best Film) | Nominated — did not win |
| Deadline Hollywood | Oscar nomination prediction — Best Actress | Described as deserving nomination |
| Critics Choice Association | Best Actress contender | Under consideration (as of Jan 2026) |
| SAG Awards | Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role | Nominated (2026) |
The San Sebastián Donostia Award — given to Lawrence as part of the festival that screened Die My Love — is one of international cinema’s most distinguished honorary recognitions. Previous recipients include Meryl Streep, Judi Dench, Cate Blanchett, and Bette Davis. Lawrence receiving it at 35, for a film she also produced, marks a shift in how the industry perceives her: from star to filmmaker, from talent to auteur collaborator.
Lawrence’s Oscar history: she won Best Actress for Silver Linings Playbook (2012, age 22 — the second-youngest Best Actress winner in Academy history), and received additional nominations for American Hustle (2013), Winter’s Bone (2010), and Joy (2015). Die My Love — if the Academy embraces it — would be her fifth nomination.
FAQs: Jennifer Lawrence Die My Love
Who is in the cast of Die My Love?
Jennifer Lawrence (Grace — young writer, postpartum psychosis), Robert Pattinson (Jackson — Grace’s husband), Sissy Spacek (Pam — Jackson’s widowed mother), Nick Nolte (Harry — Pam’s husband), LaKeith Stanfield (Karl — local man Grace becomes fixated on). It is Lawrence and Pattinson’s first film together.
Where can I watch Die My Love?
MUBI — globally from December 23, 2025. MUBI holds rights in the US, UK, India, Latin America, Germany, Italy, Spain, Australia, and more. MUBI acquired the film at Cannes for a record $24 million — the largest deal of the 2025 festival.
Was Jennifer Lawrence pregnant during filming?
Yes. She was four and a half months pregnant with her second child when filming began in August 2024. She said her own “great” pregnancy hormones were what allowed her to safely access the character’s much darker emotional states.
How did the Die My Love project start?
Martin Scorsese read Ariana Harwicz’s 2012 novel in his private filmmaker book club in 2022 and sent it to Jennifer Lawrence, believing she was perfect for the lead role. Lawrence confirmed the project in November 2022. She brought Lynne Ramsay in as director. The screenplay was written by Ramsay, Enda Walsh, and Alice Birch.
Did Die My Love win at Cannes?
It was nominated for the Palme d’Or and received a six-minute standing ovation at its May 17 premiere. It did not win — the Palme went to Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident. However, MUBI acquired it immediately for $24 million — the biggest deal of the entire festival.
What is Die My Love’s critical rating?
Rotten Tomatoes: 74% (261 reviews). Metacritic: 72 (54 critics — “generally favorable”). IMDb: 6.1 (general audience). CinemaScore: D+. The gap between professional critics and general audiences is the defining feature of its reception.
Sources: Wikipedia — Die My Love (complete production and reception) · Deadline — MUBI US release date announcement (Jun 2025) · Deadline — Official trailer release (Oct 2025) · IMDb — Die My Love (2025) · Primetimer — Release guide: where to watch and what to expect · Primetimer — Complete cast breakdown · W Magazine — Everything to know about Die My Love (Oct 2025) · The Wrap — Where to watch Die My Love (Nov 2025) · MUBI — Die My Love official page
Popcorn in hand and a opinion ready — Emily covers movie reviews, box office buzz, and all things cinema at Popcorn Review.
