die my love (w&d lynne ramsay, w. alice birch, enda walsh)

It turns out that Scorsese, who sent Ariana Harwicz’s novel to Jennifer Lawrence, and I have similar taste. The complexity of translating first person prose to all-seeing-eye cinema was always going to be challenging, and the film has a hit-and-miss approach, with moments of visceral Ramsay-esque filmmaking and other moments where the story just seems to rumble along. Lawrence loves being a fucked-up mother, something she has a real flair for, but in some ways the star turn is Sissy Spacek’s. She retains a luminosity which seems made for the screen, a counterpoint to the film’s emotional extravagance.