Mother!: "Die My Love"

If I seem less convinced of Lynne Ramsay's genius than some of my colleagues - heresy, I know - it's because to these eyes she's never quite matched the magic, that peculiar alchemy of grit and wonder, which she conjured in her breakthrough one-two of 1999's Ratcatcher and 2002's Morvern Callar. 2011's We Need to Talk About Kevin, so arresting on a first watch, stood exposed as brittle and more than a little silly in its paedophobia on a second, very much a work based on the writings of a once-respected literary figure who's since been revealed as a crank. And as someone who's always found Taxi Driver heavy weather at the best of times, I was unlikely to be much swayed by the Stars in their Eyes Scorseseisms of 2017's You Were Never Really Here. The gaps in the Ramsay filmography had grown so cosmically vast one sensed the diehards cheering for anything, however joyless. Ramsay's latest Die My Love is better, though; a properly prickly, black-comic anatomy of a doomed marriage, it suggests August's The Roses with the thorns left on and the volume cranked up to eleven. The couple at its centre, Grace and Jackson (Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson), are a pair of young and horny writers introduced installing themselves in a new, isolated country house in upstate New York. They dance in the kitchen, they fuck on the living-room floor, but no sooner has the title appeared than the honeymoon is over: they have a baby, which immediately changes the sexy, us-against-the-world dynamic, and her evident boredom with the trad-mom lifestyle rubs up against his disinterest in the woman she's become. Love can sometimes be a house of cards; for just shy of two hours, we watch this particular house of cards come crashing down.

It makes a hell of a noise. Grace and Jackson - loaded rock 'n' roll names - fuck and fight to prime album cuts; even after the baby arrives, the house is blasted and besieged by Alvin and the Chipmunks doing "Let's Twist Again" and Toni Basil's "Mickey". One characteristic Ramsay audibly shares with Scorsese, an exec-producer here: they both go through life with earbuds firmly in. Grace and Jackson, though, put their records on to drown out the eerie silence of the surrounding woods, and what it forces them to contemplate. I have to say they may not entirely need the background noise. Between senile in-law Nick Nolte smashing glasses, one of the screen's yappier dogs and the cries of the couple's undertended infant, this is one of the louder households you'll set foot inside, and that's before Grace's mom (Sissy Spacek) turns up wielding a loaded shotgun. (For her, motherhood means being permanently on guard.) The noise is, however, reflective of Ramsay's direction of travel in these recent, international endeavours. Part of the appeal of her British films was how dreamy and thoughtful they were: they were magical in their subtleties and asides, for what they turned up in the margins of their margins. Ramsay's American films, by contrast, have been blunter, grabbier and cruder, designed to catch eyes, assail ears and turn heads. She's not alone in this: what her career trajectory reflects above all else is how hard it's become to make a dent at the arthouse box-office in the quarter-century since Ratcatcher. Now she casts stars, strips them down and smashes them against one another as seven-year-olds do with Transformers toys; to survive, the dreamer has had to become a carnival barker. Roll up, roll up, Die My Love booms: come see Katniss Everdeen and Edward Cullen going hell-for-leather at one another, no holds barred.

This time, though, the stars really are worth the ticket price. Lawrence, a gifted comedienne whose ears could only have been fortified by working on David O. Russell sets, gets what's funny about this set-up; whether throwing herself through plate glass to avoid dealing with the kid (smash) or into the pool at a kids' birthday party (splash), she's absolutely on Ramsay's wavelength. (Asked by a checkout girl whether she's found what she's looking for, Grace snaps "in life?") This is actually a rare star vehicle that benefits from the fact our stars now skew younger. I don't think we buy either Lawrence or Pattinson as writers, particularly when there's zero physical evidence of writing in this house. But in those scenes where Grace is left to wonder the house and woods alone, Lawrence really does present as a child herself, desperate for attention and affection, for anything that might relieve the housebound boredom driving her out of her mind. More so than last year's compromised-seeming Nightbitch, Die My Love pushes new motherhood to an extreme, but - however tenuously - it remains tethered to some idea of lived reality. Pattinson seems slightly stuck in the stock useless-husband role female creatives have to write to back up their thesis, but he finds a crafty new way of playing it - something like Nicholson in The Shining, the insinuation being Jackson, too, finds this newfound responsibility deranging, even before the midfilm concussion that leaves him permanently on the backfoot. Ramsay, for her part, still looks to be finding her way back to full power. A late wedding-party flashback tells us nothing we didn't already either know or infer about this relationship; the fuck-it ending is as nihilist as anything in the Lanthimos film. If I remain reluctant to burden this filmmaker with the tag of genius, it's because we've still only seen half the picture. We know from her handful of films that she doesn't care much for kids, and that she finds even marriage a maddening chore. But what does she like? What does she thrill to? What does she find beautiful or stimulating or arousing, even? With the world in the state it is, does Lynne Ramsay still dream and wonder?

Die My Love is now playing in cinemas nationwide.