'Die My Love' is an exploration of mad love and mental illness

“We all go a little loopy the first year,” a kindly Sissy Spacek tells Jennifer Lawrence’s struggling young mother in “Die My Love.” It’s an amusing understatement, given the blood, fire and roiling psychosis of director Lynne Ramsay’s latest sickly funny nerve-shredder, another not-for-the-timid exploration of mad love and mental illness from a filmmaker whose movies tend to feel like fugue states. The Glaswegian director likes to shoot psychological breakdowns from the inside out, putting us in the haunted headspaces of protagonists such as Samantha Morton’s grief-numbed girlfriend in Ramsay’s 2002 masterpiece “Morvern Callar,” or Joaquin Phoenix’s PTSD-afflicted vigilante-for-hire in her most recent picture, 2018’s “You Were Never Really Here.”

Loosely based on a 2012 novel by Ariana Harwicz, “Die My Love” is somewhat misleadingly being sold as an issue drama about postpartum depression, but it’s really more of a morbid comedy about how everyday life is enough to drive anybody insane. Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson star as Grace and Jackson — a cool, hard-partying couple from New York City who move into a ramshackle country house formerly owned by Jackson’s uncle. (The grimly funny details of Uncle Frank’s demise won’t be revealed until later.) They’re the kind of crazy kids who can’t stop pawing at each other, talking a lot at first about the album he’ll never record and the book that she won’t end up writing. Eventually their ardor cools, Jackson takes a crummy job on the road and Grace is stuck at home alone all day with the baby, quietly losing her mind until she’s not so quiet about it anymore.

Ramsay sets the tone up front, introducing Lawrence masturbating with one hand while clutching a massive kitchen knife in the other. “Die My Love” is nothing if not a showcase for the actress’s feral, full-bodied commitment. Grace crawls around on all fours like a jungle cat, barks back at the dog, scratches at the wallpaper until her fingernails bleed and hurls herself through a plate glass window face-first. She fantasizes about a lone motorcycle rider (LaKeith Stanfield) she sometimes sees speeding past the secluded house, a symbol of freedom much like a neighbor’s horse on which she briefly becomes fixated. (The Stanfield stuff doesn’t ever really pay off, but wait till you see what happens to the horse.) In her more subdued moments, Grace imagines lovely conversations with Jackson’s deceased, dementia-addled dad, touchingly played by the great Nick Nolte.

The story goes that Martin Scorsese sent a copy of Harwicz’s book to Lawrence, saying she was the only actress alive who could pull off the part. The two wound up producing the picture together, recruiting Ramsay to direct because of Lawrence’s obsession with “Ratcatcher,” the Scottish filmmaker’s 1999 debut. Scorsese wasn’t wrong about Lawrence. In her early 20s, she already seemed like the second coming of Barbara Stanwyck, with the rare kind of movie star magnetism that an audience is willing to follow anywhere.

Now 35 and in complete command of her craft, Lawrence takes us to some pretty dark places in “Die My Love.” But she also has such a natural comic energy that you find yourself laughing at some of the movie’s most appalling moments. At one point, Jackson attempts to placate his wife with the world’s most annoying dog — a pet she didn’t ask for that yaps and whimpers longer and louder than Eraserhead’s baby. There may be better actresses than Jennifer Lawrence working today, but I doubt any of them would be able to keep the viewer on their side the way she does when the scene gets into Kristi Noem territory.

“It’s not the baby, it’s everything else,” Grace confides at a neighbor’s party, shortly before stripping down to her underwear and jumping into a pool full of children, humiliating her husband into a panic attack. Pattinson gives a droll, generous performance as her lackluster spouse, who probably wouldn’t be able to understand his wife even if he were inclined to make an effort. Jackson comes off as one of those guys who was cool in his 20s but has nothing left in the tank now, making pathetic excuses for the condoms his wife finds in his truck’s glove compartment. Grace’s only ally is his mother, played by Spacek with the world-weary wisdom of someone who has been through this all herself. (Probably worse, since she was married to Nick Nolte.)

Ramsay’s queasily provocative 2011 “We Need to Talk About Kevin” tackled the taboo of a mother who couldn’t stand her child, which might be why the emphasis here is shifted away from the baby and more onto domestic life in general. (The baby is only referred to as “the baby” for most of the picture. It’s a little startling near the end when his name is finally said aloud.) I find it interesting that “Die My Love” is coming out so close to last month’s excellent “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.” Both are raw and messy movies about the ugly side of motherhood. They’re unafraid to alienate audiences, which only makes us feel closer to their flawed protagonists.

As per her usual custom, Ramsay splinters scenes into fragments and haunted echoes of themselves. She uses the soundtrack to turn children’s novelty tunes into eerie, insinuating taunts. By the final stretch of the film, the timeline collapses in on itself until I’m not sure if a key sequence is a flashback or not, and I’m even less sure that it matters. It’s thrilling to see big Hollywood stars like Lawrence and Pattinson using their clout to get edgy arthouse pictures like this into mainstream multiplexes. It’s also amusing to imagine a hypothetical young moviegoer raised on franchise films who wants to see what happens when Katniss from “The Hunger Games” and Edward from “Twilight” settle down and live happily ever after.

“Die My Love” is now in theaters.