DIE MY LOVE**** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Day 11

Lynne Ramsay (YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE) creates a claustrophobic, deeply unsettling, occasionally mordantly funny drama about a mentally fragile woman suffering severely from post-partum depression. It stars Jennifer Lawrence in a raw, vulnerable role as the dangerously unboundaried mother in question. She cannot write, her sex life has gone to shit, she has lost her tolerance for the banal bullshit people say to mothers. Some of her rude interjections are funny.  But as the film goes on it becomes more and more frightening. We realise that while post-partum is definitely a factor, Grace was not well from the start.  And we ratchet up to a finale that’s both poetic and devastating.  It’s a bravura performance from Lawrence, and shows us just what she is capable of when she makes the right choice of material - something that has been sadly lacking for pretty much the last decade.  Robert Pattinson is also good in the smaller role of Grace’s husband Jackson. It’s a tricky role because he could so easily be played as unfeeling or feckless but he’s just a young man out of his depth.

This is a film that is slippery and refuses easy answers.  We are never really sure if things are happening for real or in Grace’s fevered imagination.  Does she really sleep with a mysterious neighbour (LaKeith Stanfield) or is he just a man she meets in a supermarket and then projects her sexual frustration upon.  Most importantly, when Grace finally says “enough” is she leaving the baby that she clearly loves, in spite of everything, or is she going to take her own life?  Even the attitude of the people around her is tricky to parse.  How far was Grace’s mother-in-law (Sissy Spacek) aware of her mental instability from the start? Her attitude at the wedding appears to be one of suppressed shock. And at a social gathering later on in the film, one of covering up and enablement.

My only criticism of the film is that when you make something that claustrophobic and intense then the running time of probably needs to be shorter.  I think 100 minutes would have been ideal. But I loved the way Ramsay traps us in a world that threatens to suffocate us, most notably by using a 4:3 aspect ratio and essentially one location.

DIE MY LOVE has a running time of 118 minutes.  It played Cannes and London. It will be released in the USA on November 7th and in the UK on November 24th.

YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE - Day 11 - BFI London Film Festival 2017

The following is a group review from Meester Phil, Duncan and Nicki and I:

Lynne Ramsay (WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN) returns to our screens with the extreme revenge thriller YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE.  Joaquin Phoenix plays an extremely disturbed man who was abused by his father as a child and takes care of his mother as an adult.  He's also a veteran who now earns a living rescuing people for money armed with a blunt hammer.  At the start of the film he's commissioned by a politician who's wife just committed suicide to find their runaway daughter who's been captured by a paedophile ring.  Except his exfiltration is messed up by some corrupt cops. At that point, the film goes into a revenge thriller involving potentially some politicians and maybe the idea that the dad was somehow molesting the daughter. The film is deliberately tricksy with the timeline and motivations and how far we can trust the slippery memory and perception of the lead character. 

Duncan and Nicki describe the movie as too arthouse, bizarre, all over the place and difficult to follow.  They came out wondering what the point was.  And we're still sitting in the bar trying to figure out what exactly happened. Even Meester Phil conceded that Lynne Ramsay may have been being too obtuse for her own good.  But everyone did love the cinematography - particularly the way in which Lynne Ramsay used extreme close-ups and almost shot from the victims point of view, looking up at a looming killer.   Meester Phil in particular loved the use of mirror imagery, lights through rain, blurred imagery, and the beautiful and impactful shots of underwater scenes. All agree that it was visually great.  Finally, we all really loved Jonny Greenwood's unique and dramatic score, and the use of already existing music for juxtaposition.  There are some very twee songs that underscore some very violent scenes and it works brilliantly.

My final comment is that a lot of the way that violence and revenge was handled reminded her of Park Chan Wook. I walked out of the film thinking that Ramsay had watched a lot of the Vengeance trilogy and taken something of Lynch's use of music.  

YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE has a running time of 85 minutes. The film is rated 15 for strong violence, injury detail and child sex abuse as a theme. The film played Cannes 2017 where it won Best Screenplay alongside THE KILLING OF A SACRED DEER and Joaquin Phoenix won Best Actor.  It also played London 2017. It opened in 2017 in  Belgium, France and Spain. It opened earlier in 2018 in the Netherlands, the Czech Republic and Romania. It opens on March 9th in the UK, Ireland and Norway; on March 22nd in Denmark, Greece, Croatia and Russia; on April 6th in the USA; on April 13th in Poland; on April 26th in Germany and in Sweden on April 27th.

London Film Fest 2011 Day 7 - WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN

Lionel Schriver's hugely successful novel "We Need To Talk About Kevin" is a powerful, intelligent and provocative novel about the mother of a boy who commits a high school massacre.  The framing tool of the novel is that the mother, Eva, is writing letters to her husband, Franklyn, trying to explain what her life has become, and how she rationalises their part in raising a son who would commit such acts. From the earliest years we see the conflict between good-natured but naive Franklyn who wants two kids and a house in the suburbs, and Eva, the bohemian travel writer and City girl who has a deep antipathy to giving that up to raise children.  And so we assume Franklyn and Eva are divorced.  Eva describes the lack of bond she felt for Kevin as a child, his tantrums, her frustration, and Franklyn's disbelief that Kevin was actually playing psychological games with them. And then, when they have another child, sweet little Celia - so crucial because it shows that Eva can be a loving mother - they have their most powerful disagreement on Kevin's role in an "accident" with some bleach.  The tension builds - we know the letters will take us through Kevin's adolescence to his gruesome act of murder, and we like Eva, want an explanation.  But Schriver is far too subtle and realistic to give us easy answers.  It's a stunningly well-written novel, and I can also highly recommend the unabridged audiobook read by Lorelei King - whose voice I thought was the definitive Eva.

In approaching the material, writer-director Lynne Ramsay (MORVEN CALLAR) and writer (and actor) Rory Kinnear have taken a free approach - after all, one cannot easily translate an epistolary novel to screen, and the audience is likely familiar with the "big reveals" at the end of the novel by now. They keep the idea of the framing device - Eva in post-massacre life, bearing the insults and shame - and the chronological telling of Kevin's childhood.  However, they begin with an almost impressionistic set of scenes giving us the atmosphere of the present and the past, hints at the suburban life that has been destroyed, and before that, of Eva's life of travel - all with a nightmare vividness. The screenplay is really a masterclass in how to translate a popular novel to screen, keeping all the thematic material in tact, but without being slavish.

The performances are likewise superlative.  Tilda Swinton really is as good as everyone says as Eva - depicting both the ambitious businesswoman and the broken, guilt-ridden mother.  John C Reilly, who I couldn't really see as Franklyn before I watched the film, perfectly captures his naivete and frustrating blindness.  But it's the two Kevin's who really stand out - Rock Duer as the young boy, and Ezra Miller as the teenager. The ability to go from pure evil, mocking stare to charming smile as the audience switches from Eva to Franklyn - truly superb and sadistic. 

On the technical side, DP Seamus McGarvey (ATONEMENT) does outstanding work, and  Jonny Greenwood's score is wonderful. (THERE WILL BE BLOOD).  But I had one massive problem with the direction, and that's the ham-fisted crude use of "blood" imagery - from Eva covered in crushed tomatoes; to over-filled jam sandwiches; to red paint thrown on a house; to Eva washing her hand's of aforementioned paint......Yes, we get it, there will be blood, and the blood, as for Lady Macbeth, will be hard to wash off, metaphorically speaking.  But please, enough already. Where is the subtlety of Schriver in this blood-fetishism?

<< Ezra Miller (Kevin); Lynne Ramsay (Director) and Lionel Schriver (Author) at the UK premiere of WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN at the BFI London Film Festival 2011.


WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN played Cannes, Toronto and London 2011. It opened in France earlier this month and opens in Ireland and the UK on October 21st. It opens in Greece and Hungary on November 3rd; in Australia on November 17th; in NYC and LA on December 9th and then on wide release in the USA on January 27th. It opens in Sweden on February 17th.