Lynne Ramsay’s Die, My Love Earns 9-Minute Ovation at Cannes as Jennifer Lawrence Ignites Awards Buzz

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May 17

Written By Jonathan P. Moustakas

Jennifer Lawrence receives a thunderous nine-minute ovation for her role in Lynne Ramsay’s Die, My Love, a bold and hallucinatory film that places both director and star at the forefront of awards season buzz.

The Croisette witnessed one of its most emotionally charged nights in recent memory as Lynne Ramsay’s long-awaited return to cinema, Die, My Love, debuted to an overwhelming reception. At the Grand Théâtre Lumière, the audience leapt to their feet for a full nine-minute standing ovation that reverberated through the Palais des Festivals like a collective exhale of awe. Applause surged like waves—sometimes thunderous, sometimes hushed, but always sustained—as the credits rolled and the lights came up. By the time Ramsay joined Jennifer Lawrence onstage for the curtain call, it was clear that this was not merely another acclaimed Cannes premiere—it was a cinematic reckoning.

Based on the Argentine novel by Ariana Harwicz, Die, My Love tells the story of a woman consumed by postpartum depression and mental disintegration while living in rural France. Under Ramsay’s direction, the film transforms the source material’s lyrical violence into a surreal, expressionist fever dream. It’s a harrowing excavation of maternal ambivalence, existential dread, and psychic dislocation, captured with the uncompromising boldness Ramsay is revered for. Having last directed You Were Never Really Here, a modern masterpiece of emotional minimalism and atmospheric brutality, Ramsay’s latest may be her most visceral and lyrical film to date.

Jennifer Lawrence, who also produces, stars as the unnamed woman at the story’s center, and her performance is being heralded as a landmark in her career. Long regarded as a generational talent with a gift for blending vulnerability with edge, Lawrence disappears entirely into this role. Her portrayal is raw, defiant, and volatile—one moment languid with despair, the next erupting with hallucinatory rage. At a press conference following the premiere, critics and journalists buzzed about her potential for Best Actress recognition across both festival and awards circuits.

Much of the early buzz surrounds Lawrence’s willingness to shed the polished persona that made her a Hollywood staple and delve headfirst into something far more jagged. Her character is at once repellent and tragic—a woman estranged from herself, flailing against expectations of domesticity, femininity, and sanity. In one unforgettable sequence, she screams into a void of trees until her voice becomes hoarse. In another, she stares unblinking at her sleeping child with a mix of terror and awe, her face a quiet battlefield of unspoken impulses. It is the kind of role that few actors would dare take on, and fewer still could pull off.

The supporting cast adds heft to the psychological density of the film. Robert Pattinson plays her quietly unraveling husband with aching reserve, anchoring scenes with quiet devastation. LaKeith Stanfield turns up as a spectral presence—perhaps real, perhaps imagined—representing the woman’s fractured past. Sissy Spacek, in a hauntingly effective role as the protagonist’s mother, brings an air of worn wisdom and helpless detachment, while Nick Nolte delivers a brief but deeply affecting turn as an elderly neighbor who senses something deeply wrong and is powerless to intervene.

Ramsay’s visual style is as singular as ever. Working with cinematographer Natasha Braier (The Neon Demon), the film oscillates between stark naturalism and dreamlike abstraction. The French countryside becomes both haven and prison. Interiors are claustrophobic, bathed in shadow and disarray; exteriors feel agoraphobic, infinite, and indifferent. The score, composed by Mica Levi, pulses like a second heartbeat, combining atonal strings, ambient drone, and the occasional burst of jarring noise to match the film’s fluctuating emotional state. Scenes blend into each other like memory fragments—disorienting, layered, and emotionally unfiltered.

Critics at Cannes immediately pegged Die, My Love as a frontrunner for the Palme d’Or. But more than its awards prospects, the film represents a triumphant moment for auteur-driven cinema in an increasingly franchise-dominated industry. In an era when many arthouse directors are being pushed to the margins, Ramsay’s uncompromising vision—especially one centered on a woman’s fractured psyche—feels like a reclamation. Her film doesn’t ask to be liked. It demands to be felt.

Robert Pattinson, Lynne Ramsay, Sissy Spacek, LaKeith Stanfield and Jennifer Lawrence at the ‘Die, My Love’ premiere at Cannes. **Dominique Charriau/WireImage**

What elevates Die, My Love beyond standard festival fare is its refusal to offer catharsis. There’s no dramatic arc in the conventional sense, no tidy character growth or narrative resolution. Instead, Ramsay builds a world where emotions defy logic and plot is sublimated by texture. Viewers are left to flounder in the protagonist’s emotional wake, asking themselves uncomfortable questions about motherhood, mental health, and identity. The experience is grueling—but also invigorating. It is cinema as confrontation, as disruption.

The press conference that followed was filled with discussion about the film’s psychological realism and stylistic audacity. Ramsay cited inspirations ranging from Harwicz’s original text to Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman and Lars von Trier’s Antichrist. She emphasized her desire to make a film that didn’t sanitize female rage but explored it in all its contradictions—its violence, its tenderness, its eroticism, and its capacity for annihilation.

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The reverberations of Die, My Love could already be felt outside the theater. Online, critics began proclaiming Lawrence a lock for awards season, calling the film "the cinematic cousin to Breaking the Waves and Repulsion, but filtered through the surrealism of David Lynch." Social media lit up with testimonials from journalists and cinephiles who felt gutted, galvanized, or completely shattered by the film. Variety, IndieWire, and The Guardian posted early raves, with some already calling it Ramsay’s magnum opus.

As the Cannes Film Festival continues to roll out its slate, Die, My Love has set a high bar—both in artistic ambition and emotional wallop. It is a film that lingers in the body long after viewing, like a fever you can’t sweat out. For Ramsay, it’s a triumphant return. For Lawrence, it may well be the role that redefines her legacy.