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DIE MY LOVE ***½/**** starring Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Pattinson, LaKeith Stanfield, Sissy Spacek screenplay by Enda Walsh & Lynne Ramsay and Alice Burch, based on the novel by Ariana Harwicz directed by Lynne Ramsay
KEEPER ***½/**** starring Tatiana Maslany, Rossif Sutherland, Birkett Turton, Eden Weiss written by Nick Lepard directed by Osgood Perkins
by Walter Chaw A woman’s body is the battleground we savage, collateral damage in the litigation of collective fear: battered, bloodied, stripped of dignity and individuality. Every religion is founded on the control of it, and most secular bans are, too. A woman is blamed for our knowledge of good and evil, a woman’s beauty for the Trojan War. The opening of a woman’s “box” unleashes all the evils of the world. It is the incubator of our anxieties, the beginning and the end, the salvation and the sin. Her body is the rich, fertile black of the richest loam, and when blood and semen fall upon it, monsters grow. It’s always a trap, and very seldom a person; always a fatale, never merely a femme. It is the Grail, and men, the knights errant in thrall to it. Small wonder that so many of our horror films are about a woman’s body and the florid, manifold violations men visit upon it. More still are about women proving both stronger and stranger than men could ever begin to imagine. No wonder the malleability of flesh, the perverse elasticity of skin, like a scrim stretched between states of being, is where we centre our notions of identity and nurse our fetishistic fascinations. We magnify and romanticize their difference. We make a woman’s body an object of worship, a golden calf that, if we regard it as such, suddenly becomes the core of four of the ten Old Testament Christian Commandments instead of only three. Six, if we also consider her body property to be coveted and stolen.
I am haunted by Rosemary Woodhouse, the chip in her husband’s bargain with the Devil, choosing, in the end, to be the mother she is expected to be. I see it as neither a surrender nor a victory. It isn’t a binary, the motherhood question. It’s ineffable, a mystery hardwired into our biology and transmuted into art we understand innately, yet cannot articulate. An edict marked upon our souls by divine, or infernal, quills. Rosemary’s Baby is terrifying for many reasons, but it lingers because it’s at once Byzantine and obvious, inexplicable and just so, an entire contradiction and, as a result, existentially risky. It’s a horror movie because it offers a glimpse–a flash, really–of how insufficient we are when it comes to understanding the massive complication of what we are. Like looking into a mirror that shows us precisely what we think of ourselves in excruciating, unsparing, relentless detail. What if–follow me here–we don’t know anything and are in control of nothing? All of this pain. All of this unmet potential. When my wife and I were suffering through our third, most racking, most emotionally displacing miscarriage, Rosemary’s Baby is the movie she, in her rage and inconsolable despair, wanted to watch on a loop. She doesn’t know why. I don’t, either. Actually, I do. We both do. I just can’t explain it to you. And you don’t need me to.
It’s interesting that there’s been a recent run of films endorsing messy mothers, notably Marielle Heller’s disappointing, self-defeating Nightbitch, Mary Bronstein’s prickly (and brilliant) If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, and the delirious one-two foxtrot of Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love and Osgood Perkins’s Keeper.* I say “interesting” when I mean to say I’m thrilled. These are films more closely aligned with A Woman Under the Influence than with The Hours; more invested in the liberating truth of ugliness and trauma than in redemptive restorations of the cult of June Cleaver. Together, they form a manifesto of sorts against self-aggrandizing garbage like Chloé Zhao’s high dudgeon, untempered tantrum pratfall Hamnet, which elevates motherhood to the state of ecstatic visitation for the good of absolutely no one. One kind of film allows women to be human beings–the other plays into the same old deadly tropes that ‘Handmaid’s Tales’ women into lives as indentured broodmares to their creative husbands and the spawn such men, all men, have purportedly earned from them by birthright.
Jennifer Lawrence’s Grace in Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love is in love with aspiring something Jackson (Robert Pattinson). (Writer? Musician? Something cool.) I mean, things are looking up, given that his uncle, a hoarder, has died and left him a beautiful house in the middle of the woods. A fixer-upper, but they’re young, and the world is their oyster, as they say. In the film’s propulsive opening, they play like animals in rut, wrestling, fucking, dancing as an inferno erupts around them. It’s not a real fire, but the fire is real. They have a baby Grace leaves alone in his little seat on their porch while she crawls through the overgrowth like a predator stalking its helpless prey. She’s armed herself with a butcher knife. She lies down in the warm dirt and puts her hand down the front of her pants. She tries to get Jackson to fuck her like the good ol’ days, but he doesn’t. He’s lost some of the spontaneity that defined their lives together in the early going–the realities of too much work, too much disappointment: the natural progression from passionate love to the companionate kind, even. Whatever it is, Grace doesn’t like it. She should be thrilled. She has everything. She has a hot guy, a baby, a house, and time on her hands to do whatever she wants. She gets along with her in-laws, Pam (Sissy Spacek) and especially Harry (Nick Nolte), who is demented and angry at a frequency Grace can vibe with. While Pam is mostly still herself, she occasionally wanders the trails outside her home at night with a loaded shotgun. And Jackson’s brought Grace a dog, except the dog won’t stop barking, and she’s going to shoot it herself if he doesn’t do something about it.
Die My Love is the spiritual sequel to Ramsay’s Morvern Callar, another film about a young woman who finds herself at a crossroads and not only does not choose the obvious path, but walks off the path into the black of the grasping thicket and thorned wild. Grace doesn’t owe anyone anything, least of all the veneer of satisfaction polite society demands. At a particularly uncomfortable party celebrating Grace’s second release from a mental institution, a parade of “normal” women lines up to tell her how “well” she looks. Ramsay takes pains to linger on their looks of judgment as they try to insinuate themselves in Grace’s private misery. The best thing they can think to say to a woman is that she looks healthy, perhaps healthy enough to bear Jackson another child. Jackson, who has repainted and repaired their home while she was away. (It was always Grace, after all, preventing him from living like a normal person, right?) Jackson, who asks her to marry him, which she does–and then on their wedding night, she slips again. “No one talks about how hard it is to raise a child,” a pretty young mother tells Grace. Grace can barely conceal her contempt: “That’s all anyone ever talks about.” She’s sick to death of the conversation. Grace takes off her clothes and jumps in the pool. She announces to these nice people that she shot a dog because it wouldn’t stop howling, and the only person who laughs is a little girl, unmarried and still feral, who has just met her reflection and possible role model.
Die My Love plays like a fever dream, a hallucination of freedom in which a woman is allowed not to be content. I love the bestial poetry of a sequence in which Grace, one breast out from nursing her baby, stands over a blank parchment, flicking ink on it as mother’s milk drips on the paper in concert. Masculine/feminine creation, a literalized conception of Yin and Yang. Witchcraft. The deep magic. Lawrence is a dangerous kind of star, a Miriam Hopkins made of earth and sex. Imagine someone as frictionless and smooth as Margot Robbie in this; now imagine Jennifer Lawrence in Babylon. She’s wicked smart, hyper-powered in such a way that she might be sorry afterwards, but she’s killed you already and given your body to the pigs. She’s extraordinary in Darren Aronofsky’s mother!, the mirrored inverse of Die My Love, in which a woman is vivisected by her choice to subsume herself to the myth of male genius. She’s extraordinary again here as Ramsay frames her against various portals, open or, in one memorable sequence, closed, through which Grace finally makes her way into the fire of unusual choices. Die My Love is a difficult film to like. Thank God.
Tatiana Maslany is dangerous, too–unpredictable, wiry. As Liz in Osgood Perkins’s Keeper, she tells a buddy on the phone that she’s going away to a remote cabin for the weekend with her boyfriend of one year, Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland), and that, for the occasion, he’s bought her a beige cardigan. “I don’t even think I’ve heard you say the word ‘beige’ before,” her friend says, and Liz doesn’t laugh, exactly, but plays along. “Does he want kids?” Liz says she never really saw herself as a mother. The question Keeper asks is whether society can ever see a young woman of marriageable age as anything but a potential wife. Perkins is a master of negative space. When Liz takes a long soak in the tub, he frames her head beneath a pitch black “v,” an alcove for a second-story window overlooking the wilderness. As she luxuriates in the water, we examine the shadows for the source of the anxiety we’re beginning to feel. Maybe it’s how unlikable Malcolm is, how he’s weak enough to want a slap across the mouth, his apologetic insincerity immediately at odds with Liz’s ferocity. After Malcolm’s slimy cousin Darren (Birkett Turton) and his date, Minka (Eden Weiss), pay them a surprise visit, Liz expresses her displeasure at having her weekend invaded by a woman she sees as callow and inferior. She wonders if they “scraped out her brains to fill out her tits,” and the anger of that, the meanness of that, is unexpected and disorienting.
All of Keeper is an exercise in the uncanny: folks acting funny, things where they shouldn’t be, people slightly out of tune–warnings subtle enough to be overlooked, no matter how often they present themselves. Are those voices Liz is hearing through the house’s heating exchanges, whispering with Malcolm when she’s out of the room? Who drew the heart in the condensation of their breath on a window? And what’s the deal with the cake the “caretakers” leave for them in a “tradition” Malcolm doesn’t bother explaining before forcing her to have a slice. “I hate chocolate,” she says. “I thought all women liked chocolate,” he replies. There it is again: the expectations men have of women. Liz channels all of her bitterness towards getting pigeonholed into a sarcastic bite of the cake.
I imagine the only reason Liz has stuck it out with Malcolm is that she’s pushing 40 and sick of her friends teasing her about spinsterhood. It’s hard not to internalize a culture’s bigotry, and for as much as Liz appears to resent Malcolm, it seems she’s not so big a fan of herself, either. Later that first night, Liz gets up for a snack. She violently explores the interior of the cake with her fingers, squeezing its insides through her fists, then jams handfuls of it into her face. It’s not defiance anymore, it’s compulsion–actions committed in a fugue state, and a statement, perhaps, on how destructive gender roles can be when applied with broad, impersonal strokes. In tone, in its doomed nihilism, Keeper most reminded me of Robert Voskanian’s The Child, of which it could be a soft remake. It’s easy to suss out how the picture will end, in other words, but even so, the way Perkins pays off the Dark Water/The Orphanage conclusion–and credit here to the visual effects team–feels fresh as a daisy and scary as fuck.
Liz’s choices, like Grace’s, are reduced by the end of Keeper to a binary: motherhood or shunned outcast. Still, I like how the protagonists of both Die My Love and Keeper fight for a supernatural third option. They share fates with the martyrs of the world’s great mythologies: the women wronged who become nightingales and constellations, Medean figures boiling their children to feed their husbands in ironic caricatures of matrimonial–and maternal–duties. The conclusions to their stories are like the warnings in campfire tales: On certain hot summer nights, you can hear her laughing, splashing in the river, floating above the trees–but don’t let yourself follow her into the deep green cool of shadow and vale, or you will never see this world again. You will feed and drink of her body, and you will look upon her until you are blind and voiceless and rooted to the forest floor. She will be your mother. It’s the only thing you want anymore.
*I would even add to the mix Babak Anvari’s tremendous two-hander Hallow Road, with Rosamund Pike as essentially two different kinds of mothers: one who “fails” and continues to fail, and one who seemingly never will.
