Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love doesn’t feel like a film as much as it does an awkwardly sequenced amalgamation of scenes of a woman spiraling out of control by the second. As a woman, I think I understand what the film is trying to go for, but I don’t think the execution sits well with me. Lynne and Jennifer both describe it as a poetic film, which has me thinking that it’s specifically made in such a way that we’re meant to be left confused and make our own interpretations of what’s happening. To be fair, there’s more than one way you can look at what this movie is talking about. It isn’t as simple as “she had a baby and now she wants to die.” Neither is it “she had a baby and now hates her husband and thinks he’s a cheat.” Depression isn’t so easy to represent visually, I understand that, but what this film is trying to say is kind of lost in its confusing storytelling and lacking script. I wish there was more to go by apart from a stunning performance from Lawrence. But this is me basically implying that this film isn’t one that has a clear-cut ending; what you might think of it can be entirely different from how I interpret it, but that’s where the beauty of the message lies. I guess it really makes you self-reflect. But, with that said, let’s dive into some of the moments leading up to the terrifying ending of Die My Love.
Spoiler Alert
What Does The Horse Symbolize?
There’s a lot of this movie that feels claustrophobic without actually being that way. There’s a beauty in the aesthetic, of course, but there’s also a dark, ominous vibe to it almost as soon as the first night in the new house begins. Grace and Jackson have moved into his dead uncle’s house in the middle of nowhere. The first thing to make note of here is that Grace is born and bred in New York; she’s used to city life, and she specifically made this decision to join Jackson in the countryside because she’s feral for him (and also because it might help her with her writing). Even if nothing else is clear in this film, one thing is for certain: she feels an animalistic attraction to Jackson, so she’d literally do anything for him. But that’s when everything goes wrong, and a baby’s on the way, and she’s trapped at home while he can go around wherever he likes because of “work.” Now, different people will have different feelings about Jackson’s ambiguous love life, but I think the one hint we get about him actually being a cheat is the “protection” he keeps in the car.
Anyway, in the movie, after Jackson basically dumps a dog onto Grace on top of the crying baby, she feels even more trapped during this process. Jackson thinks he’s being an amazing partner, bringing her company, but she’s absolutely disgusted by the idea of looking after 2 babies instead of one. Now, one could compare the baby with the dog and the horse with Grace. In the scene where Jackson hits the horse, it’s the dog that gets hurt the most, not Jackson or Grace. If we think of Grace as the horse, Jackson hitting the horse is a metaphor for Jackson’s abandonment of Grace. The horse runs away, and Grace is stuck there wishing she could do the same. But more importantly, she ends up shooting the dog, wailing all night because it’s hurt. Because Grace and Jackson’s relationship is floundering, the little baby is also not getting the life it deserves. It’s ridiculous how Jackson can just thrust this responsibility on her when she’s already basically got a 24/7 job that he doesn’t seem to care about at all, nor help with. When the baby’s crying at night, it’s always Grace waking up. But then what about her needs? They’re also left unfulfilled, because he seems to be getting whatever he needs elsewhere.
Sure, Grace is genuinely unhinged, and having a baby sends her into some sort of psychosis, but it’s the circumstances that push her to go there. All Grace is really feeling is that she’s been crippled by Jackson, who brought her here and left her to deal with their life on her own. To make matters worse, it’s clear from the start that Grace was never meant to be domesticated. She isn’t the kind of woman who likes to sit at home and bake for her husband, who goes out and works hard to bring home the bacon. She’s the kind of person who gets upset that she can’t bake a cake from scratch for her 6-month-old baby. So you can’t just say she’s feeling postpartum depression; there’s something much more complicated here.
The thing is, there is something about childbearing that makes it almost a communal event. It’s not something that just two people can really handle. But in this case, Grace has nobody to fall back on. She feels abandoned by her parents, who died early on, and the only person she connected with in Jackson’s family has also passed on, so there’s really nobody who can help her get out of this situation. This is why she acts out; she lets out the “beast” inside her, which is probably why the dude who meets her in the hotel room sings that song for her. She just wants to prowl through the grass and feel free, but Jackson married her to lock her up, not just metaphorically, but to institutionalize her.
Are Grace and Jackson both cheating on each other?
The moment the baby shows up, Grace begins to feel neglected by Jackson. She all but throws herself at him, and he just brushes her aside several times. On one occasion, fairly early in the film, she calls him up on the phone out of the blue, and he seems surprised; it’s clear that communication between them is not what it used to be, and her calling up is a sign that something’s gone wrong. She just wants to know when he’ll be home and if they can have dinner together, a simple romantic gesture, but he practically ignores her when the waitress starts talking to him, asking her how the baby’s doing instead. After Grace hangs up, she imagines Jackson making passionate love to the waitress instead of her, clearly sexually frustrated. But was there any truth to the suspicion that Jackson was out there hooking up with other women while Grace was stuck at home tending to the baby and (at least temporarily) putting up with the dog?
There’s a moment after a fight when Jackson drags Grace out to the truck and takes them on a drive, leaving the baby back home, just so they can have a conversation about what’s wrong. Nothing much comes of the conversation, but Grace does find a box of “protection” in the glovebox, which Jackson stumbles over himself trying to explain. First, he tries to claim that they’re an old box that she’s seen before, and then he tells her that they’re actually Greg’s. It’s when she’s fooling around with the protection that Jackson hits the horse. But while the box itself might not be proof he was cheating, a second, new box, implying the old one ran out, does hint at it. We see this box right after Grace is let out of the psychiatric hospital, and she definitely wasn’t sleeping with Jackson while she was in there. There’s also the fact that Jackson eerily mimics the cashier at the local grocery store in calling Kraft Dinners magic. Though that could just imply that she’d said it to him in the checkout line at some point instead of them sleeping together.
It’s not clear if it’s this insecurity that causes Grace to act out and step outside their marriage sexually, or purely the sexual neglect that she feels (at one point, she complains to Jackson that he hasn’t touched her in two and a half months). But the presence of the mysterious, unnamed biker definitely has an impact. Grace, so unused to domesticity and the dull, dreary life of motherhood, sees something exciting in this enigmatic figure in a red leather jacket, and that’s even before the helmet comes off to reveal the stunning Lakeith Stanfield. Perhaps when she asked him to cut his lip open with a knife, that was almost her asking him to prove he was a real person? There’s certainly a surreal, dreamlike quality to the scenes featuring Grace and the biker; they’re all at night, and the light’s all hazy. The first time he kisses her is after she takes her mother-in-law’s gun and before she shoots the dog, and the first time they have sex is after her breakdown at Greg’s houseparty, where she took off her clothes and jumped into the pool.
When she sees the biker (or at least a man with the same face) in the parking lot later, he’s married and has a wheelchair-bound daughter, but that doesn’t keep her from walking up to them, with her dialogue referencing one of Lakeith Stanfield’s older films when she says, “Sorry to bother you.” Judging by the trembling lip and the unsteady eyes, it definitely feels like he knows Grace and is nervous about her exposing him in front of his family. But then it’s possible to interpret the scenes featuring him and Grace as her emotionally withdrawing from Jackson when she knows her actions will distance them from each other, causing her to act out this spiritual adultery with a mysterious man she’s invented, based on a man she’d seen around before. A random White woman approaching the biker in the parking lot might have been enough to make him nervous anyway.
Is Grace Dead?
In Die My Love’s ending, we see Grace leave the gathering that had been set up for her return, which is funny because she herself has to bake a cake and prepare for it, making her the perfect scapegoat. Grace abandons her son and her life as a mother and a wife because she can’t handle it anymore. She just wants to be free from it all and run out into the forest, the only place she genuinely feels solace. While Grace is a writer, we never see her write, though the whole film. She doesn’t even bring out anything to write a novel, not even a notebook, and this is another way we know she’s trapped. She doesn’t feel creative or like she can actually work when she’s in a place that is so drab and lonely. The only reason she’s there is because she wants to be with Jackson, who’s also never around.
Ultimately, we loop back to the beginning of the film, where we see a forest fire. I think this fire is a representative of what’s happening inside of Grace rather than an actual forest burning down. In the final scene, Jackson watches as a naked Grace, in her most primal form, abandons everything and walks straight into the fire, giving into her innermost desire: to be free. The film is called Die My Love, and this could be interpreted in many different ways (I have not read the book, but we’d love to hear your theories about this ending if you have). For one, it can mean that Grace is actually giving up on life and leaving everything behind because she can’t handle being by herself in this situation anymore. She’s tired, and the only way she can escape it is through death. On the other hand, I feel like the “my love” could refer to both the baby and her, from Jackson’s point of view. If it’s the baby, it’s the clearest insight into postpartum. She’s feeling hatred towards the baby because of her depression. But she also burns her journal, the one thing that connected her to writing, and inside it says, “Burn it, Child.” The last time we saw Grace genuinely happy in the forest was when she was with Harry, and I don’t know about you, but I almost feel like what she’s written in there is like a message from him. Harry refers to the baby as a cat as well as a bear, both beasts, and I can’t fully make sense of what this is supposed to mean. Either way, it does feel like it has something to do with primal instinct. On the other hand, at the end, we watch as Jackson quietly stays behind and watches Grace walk into the fire, letting her embrace her inner fire. It could mean that he’s tired of whatever is happening with her, too, or it could mean that this is the only way they can be happy; if she, in fact, lets the fire burn from deep within her. To be honest, I don’t think Grace is dead. In fact, I think this ending is her aiming to get better in the future, returning to her zeal, and being her truest self after everything she’s been through. I think there’s a chance she leaves Jackson behind and takes her baby, returning to New York to live the life she’s always meant to live.
