Die My Love introduces itself to us as a film at once fussy and overwrought, and for the first fifteen minutes I wondered whether it would amount to one of those exploitative disasters nobody knows what to do with, or if it would try for something unforgivably tasteful. It's fortunate that neither possibility wins out. What was overwrought becomes grotesque, what was fussy breaks down into the deliberate experience of frustration, and then the film stands back so that it can neither judge nor enjoy its mania. It's unendurable and matter-of-fact, because it's matter-of-fact about the reality that life is unendurable. Die My Love looks at postpartum depression, schmuck boyfriends, flies, yapping dogs, and writer's block as potential causes for an unendurable life, but then concludes that pinpointing one would be to mistake the symptom for the cause. The film has a brutal, brilliant simplicity, that carries its assertion that unendurable life prefigures any symptom we can point to or resolve because it is the root and cradle of our being.
To talk about the root of being in any universal way is dubious, and Die My Love knows this. It's why it dwells on it. Grace is pregnant, and Jackson has brought her to his late uncle's home in rural Montana, just around the corner from the home he grew up in. This is a homecoming for Jackson, and a sort of introduction to the concept of home to Grace, who never had one. And so here, in nature, they will make home. It's this promise of nature as a stabilising return for the human subject that works as the symbolic and ontological nexus of Die My Love's concern with the home: that the family (and motherhood in particular) is natural, that home is where you grew up, that trees are more natural than streetlights, that nature is good and supportive of human values, that nature is the primordial home we, as humans, lost. When I say the film is simple I mean that these ideas are obvious, and that the film raises and denies them sensuously before words can interfere, because words have a way of making obvious things appear straightforward, and often they're not.
The task then is how to portray the human subject in their natural state. McGarvey's cameras luxuriate in the long grass, tracing dirt to blade to sunlight and sky, and then rush up to human faces with lenses that create a swirling distortion of green behind. Pulling back again, these lenses are swapped for Dream Lenses with gaping apertures, vignetting the picture and allowing only the narrowest passages of definition within the field. The idea is there is no negative space, no fore- or background, only a delirious material continuity between the human subject and their natural surroundings. Initially it appears like Malickian shorthand for belonging, but then the closeups recentre the human subject as a being of disorder, the lack of clarity obscures rather than suggests, and the natural landscape is relegated to a failed transcendental ideal. Nature only resists the ideas imposed on it when it seems to us like noise, and then the nature of the human subject is both its maladjustment and internal contradiction. At this point even the elliptical editing style suggests less the influx of sensory memory than it does the violent removal of presence into irregular flashes. Reduction instead of abundance and a mutual deformation, neither nature nor the subject can be stabilised because neither can be defined by an essential, internal coherence. It's violent departure in the former, and lack in the latter. Here it's claustrophobic, and strobing, and it will make you sick.
When things are still, they're still as old postcards. Often the cameras will step back and frame the human figure at night, lit on one side by the glowing windows of their rustic farmhouse, the other from the moon that has just yawned its way to them through the woods. It's a pastoral displacement of Edward Hopper, for that distinctly twentieth-century American Lebensraum that emblazons Man in Nature kitsch as some kind of eternal truth. What I find gratifying is how beautiful these images become the more their artifice is allowed to breathe. The use of ektachrome film stock registers the colours in high contrast, but then the range of colour has been limited in the day for night image manipulation, leaving us with dull intensities, like the artificial embers of an electric fireplace. Subsequent day for night post-processing gives an otherworldly quality to images that are already otherworldly. It's as though the colours were photographed separately and then recomposed, in simple layers, each negative standing above the next and never touching, lest they suggest cohesion. The use of the Academy ratio here contributes to an uncanny sense of the archival, that these are examples of very early colour photography, by genius amateurs, whose experiments were discovered half a century later in a drawer.
Elsewhere, day for night eeriness denotes the realm of sleepwalking, dreams, and nightmares. The photographic basis for these sequences are Edward Steichen's early twentieth-century Nocturnes; cyanotopes and gum prints hand-coloured and painted over. Pictorialist images such as Steichen's, existing somewhere between painting and photography, were criticised for holding back the photograph's radical potential as a recorder of reality. But of course there's a reality to their artifice as much as there's an unreality to any image professing to be direct. The paradoxical reality of oneiric image-manipulation is what Die My Love wants to tell us with its painterly nocturnes. They also invoke Henry Fuseli, a connection drawn home by the presence of the black horse. It might appear strange to discuss oneirism in relation to human/nature, but then for a Romantic these would be the landscapes not yet repressed and refracted by the demands of civilised order -- they are a kind of raw nature, transgressive by default, a 'true' self that appears to the waking mind like possession by a spirit. I thought of two things watching them. Their pictorialism reminded me first of storybooks, and then of Anthony Dod Mantle's work on Antichrist. There as here, the natural world is processed through an oneiric inner landscape, not to convey nature subjugated by the human subject, but to indicate the unfolding of the human subject into nature, which is the realm of chaos, cruelty, and death. The second thing I considered was that Die My Love is out to sabotage itself. The horse is a comically obvious motif, and the film seems to withdraw whenever it gets too close to the stupid rapture it craves. But then as I watched it assembling its ideas, assessing them, and discarding them, I remembered that Grace is trying, and failing, to write 'the great American novel', whatever that means.
Grace's writer's block brings many of these conflicts to a head, because it's unwilling to point to a greater reality beyond the image, beyond the subject, beyond the situation. The only thing for it is to fail on the terms it's established for us, so that Grace is free to fail on a new set of terms elsewhere. It's when she's hospitalised that we see her writing, now in a notebook, with Muybridge's The Horse in Motion printed on the covers. So the horse was never a horse, and then it's not that the horse she shows us is a signifier of forbidden desire, but that she is aware of what it signifies and finds this signification inadequate. Obvious things are never straightforward, and when they're presented straightforwardly they fail to get at the lived experience of the obvious. The horse cannot stand for the obvious without trivialising it, and it can't be knowingly repurposed to transcend the sign and get at its reality either. There's nothing left for her here. Grace ritualistically 'becomes-animal' in the fields, to bypass the frustrating inadequacy of words and images, but finds this is only ever a narcissistic detour to the same abyssal lack in being. The film is always with her, reaching out to affect things, and realising that no thing, good or bad, is capable of giving life a sense of movement. Failure as a foregone conclusion, the film is a whirlwind that effects a stasis precluding cause and effect. Grace, and Die My Love are in search of the failure to end all failures, the person who doesn't die but all of a sudden disappears, the film whose quasi-naturalism falls apart and, rather than taking us to the sublime black screen where everything is lost and yet even more remains possible, exposes us to a synthetic forest fire, another inadequate sign, another presence without a pulse.
John Prine and Iris Dement's In Spite of Ourselves appears twice —- I thought that, along with the inclusion of David Bowie's Kooks, it was ridiculing the works that've tried to make familial dysfunction endearing. Now I don't know. Ramsay's film is almost as funny as Prine's song, and follows its lead in cataloguing details that don't go anywhere. I suppose the difference is it's about the devastation of falling out of love, and that by the time he wrote In Spite of Ourselves Prine was on his third and final marriage. And so where late-career Prine was able to see divorce as good material for writing, Grace needs to believe it's the end of everything. So that she gets to that point and doesn't go back. It's not the end of the world, but it's the end of this one. Life endured will certainly kill you, and that you shouldn't let that happen. The film stops short of presenting Grace as an aspirational rebel for refusing assimilation into family life with her schmuck, because that would make the obvious straightforward. Instead it warns that to not let life kill you involves a kind of death, that is, to step outside of life as such. More than inspiring, that's honest.
23 November 2025