The chronically barking dog impulsively adopted early on in Die My Love shows more restraint than its new-mother protagonist. In a haze of postpartum depression thickened by her often away-for-work, suddenly sex-averse husband Jackson (an intentionally opaque and distant Robert Pattinson) and the intense isolation of their rural Montana home, Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) goes practically rabid. She will, over the course of the movie, claw cat-like at the walls, squirt a toothpaste tube’s contents all over the bathroom she’s just torn apart, attempt to hurl herself out of a speeding car, slam her face into a vanity mirror, throw herself through a sliding-glass door, and climactically set a devastating fire.

The dog comparison is not meant to be unsympathetic but drive home the degree to which solitary, largely supportless domestic expectation has exploded any semblances of self and steadiness Grace once had. (In the more sensorially than narratively motivated Die My Love, there are frequent-but-unexplored allusions to a once-ambitious writing career.) Kindled by overwhelming boredom and depression- and loneliness-aggravated psychosis, Grace’s self-destruction can come across onscreen like worrisome self-reminders that she’s alive, not merely a docile figure in someone else’s story.

Read the full column at South Sound.

Photo credit: Kimberly French, courtesy of MUBI