Die, my love: Jennifer Lawrence anguishes and dazzles in her brutal approach to a woman under the influence (****)

Despite what intuition tells us, it's not clear that it's a good thing for a film to be understood. In fact, there's only one thing worse than a film being understood, and that's being understood at all. The well-known story (although it's not clear whether it's true) of The Big Sleep is that, at a certain point, screenwriters William Faulkner and Leigh Brackett couldn't figure out who had killed one of the characters. So they called in Raymond Chandler, the author, who reacted angrily. At this point, the conclusions to the joke diverge. But the sensible thing, because it's funny, is that the unsolved enigma was actually there deliberately to add mystery to the mystery itself. We won't talk about David Lynch because it's precisely the mechanism of secrecy that drives the best part of his work.

Something similar happens with Lynne Ramsay's films, which have nothing to do with intrigue, noir, or harbor fog. Much of the work of the director of You Were Never Really Here and We Need to Talk About Kevin moves in that space where human behavior is stripped of meaning and presented in a pure, raw, and violent manner. Exaggeratedly violent. Die, My Love, her particular adaptation of Ariana Harwicz's novel featuring actors Robert Pattinson and, above all, Jennifer Lawrence (as well as icons like Sissy Spacek and Nick Nolte), is the latest installment of her always visceral point of view on all forms of blindness.

The film simply tells the story of a mother plagued by psychosis struggling to maintain her sanity. In reality, there's no plot. It isn't even a plot. The director invites the viewer to approach the screen, not so much peer into it as immerse themselves in the radioactive cloud that clouds the protagonist's soul. She and he go to the countryside, have a child, she kills the dog, scratches the bathroom wall... and so on. The film is presented as a genuine provocation. The idea isn't to unravel any skeletal threads or reflect on the importance of addressing mental illness, nor is it to offer a guideline for how to proceed should one encounter something similar. Everything is more raw because there's no novelist to call to ask who killed anyone. We're on our own.

Jennifer Lawrence offers herself on the channel like we've rarely seen from an actress in general, much less one considered a Hollywood star. If the gold standard for vibrant, elusive, enigmatic, and insurmountable performances is Gena Rowlands 's A Woman Under the Influence by John Cassavetes, this is where an actress is headed, who after years of being unlocated on Google Maps, occupied by crappy blockbusters, is finally returning to the place of those films that probably made her what she is. We're talking about Mother! by Darren Aronofsky, or... There's another one, but we can't remember right now.

Of course, Die, My Love doesn't exist to be understood. Not a little, not a lot. Die, My Love is there so that the forests burn, the mirrors shatter on foreheads, the dogs bark incessantly, and the dance numbers approach the cruelest nightmare. Let's just say that Lawrence embraces Ramsey's ideals with relish. It's in the nature of the Scottish director's characters to walk with their eyes closed on the edge of every precipice. And that's because the filmmaker is convinced that a woman or a man alone before a precipice is a conscious woman or man; conscious of their fear, of their radical freedom (even to commit suicide), and of the profound sense of time. Their own. Everyone's. Kierkegaard called it anguish and placed in the hands of that paralyzing and terribly lucid sensation, a millimeter from nothingness, the key to discovering not so much the meaning of almost everything as, indeed, its most intimate meaninglessness. Understanding everything eliminates the suspicion of being faced with something truly important. And you either believe it or you don't. There's no way to understand it.