When trying to define what makes Lynne Ramsay such a singular filmmaker, Jennifer Lawrence suggests that she is “poetry.” She takes her time, and is always worth the wait: as much in Morvern Callar, her 2002 character study of a young woman’s bleak grieving journey, as in 2011’s dark psychological portrait of a mother-son relationship, We Need to Talk About Kevin, the Scottish director “allows breath” and, if you’ve seen any of her films, it won’t come as a surprise to hear that she is “unafraid.”

In her latest, Die My Love, Ramsay takes Lawrence to the brink: a new mother and a bored, desperate, hungry wife, her character Grace flirts with mania, visceral lust and self-destruction in the young family’s old house in the country. It’s an all-consuming, emotional picture—the kind you never really forget having seen, where opinion matters little in the face of bone-deep feeling.

“I’d never seen a filmmaker like Lynne,” Lawrence tells us of her director, who she brought the script to after producer Martin Scorsese put Ariana Harwicz’s acclaimed 2012 novel of the same name to the actor for consideration. “She doesn’t even think there’s an audience [for her work]; it’s like watching her heart [on the screen]. It’s so alive and so instinctual.”

The result is a heart-in-your-mouth turn from Lawrence, without a shred of pity or platitude. She’s joined by Robert Pattinson as her idle yet optimistic husband, Jackson, in a fascinating relationship defined by its contradictions: the kind that feels so true to the daily horrors that keep us alive that it’s almost too unnerving to brush off once the story ends.

Die My Love is a film about “destroying myself just to prove I exist,” per Sydney, perfectly capturing the genuine life-or-death stakes of the wars our bodies and minds wage on us with every breath. Isaac writes that the film is “less about any diagnosable condition than about sex, desire, freedom, confinement, deceit, belief, trust, caring enough to try,” celebrating Ramsay’s incomparable work as “an embittered, tragicomic, brute-force farce.” Our only option is to laugh together to drown out the sound of our breaking hearts—Ramsay graciously gives us an audience, below, to guide us through it.

I love the idea of them having such intense chemistry, while not understanding each other at all—I’ve seen you mention A Woman Under the Influence in terms of a similar relationship that has that strain. What are some others you hold close to your heart, whether in conversation with Die My Love or not?
I love Scenes from a Marriage and Eyes Wide Shut. I don’t think much about other films while making films, but of course A Woman Under the Influence is a real classic. But what it’s more about is, do you see this kind of subject very often? Probably not. Do you see this kind of woman very often? Probably not. She’s very unapologetic; she doesn’t give a shit. She doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with her, that she’s speaking some kind of truth, while saying these very inappropriate things.

There’s a review on Letterboxd that I love, which reads, “Lynne Ramsay shaking the audience by the shoulders screaming, ‘Feel something goddamnit!’”
I love that.

When you have such a rich source text like Die My Love, how much of that feeling and rawness of emotion is on the page versus what you capture in the shoot and then amplify in the edit? The sound design in particular is terrifying, which I mean as a compliment.
To me, it’s about the flavor of something. It’s the feeling of the book, and then some of that goes into the script, and then that evolves to go somewhere else. But everything’s about cinema in the end: it comes down to when you get everyone on set and you work with the actors and before you know it, it becomes this beast, and this is very much one of those. It came away from the source material and back to it in some respects.

How does that work when it comes to the story’s humor? Every time it comes up in the film, it’s kind of breathtaking—you’re wondering if you’re laughing at the right time and in the right way.
That was the first thing I thought: it’s got to be funny. You have to have moments of humor, even if it’s absurd, black, twisted humor. There were elements of the original text where the main characters are literally just saying it exactly how it is. I thought this was interesting, especially in one of these small-town places. I ran with that, and obviously Jennifer Lawrence has this natural comic timing. It’s funny, because some people feel like just what you’re saying—“Am I allowed to laugh?”—but it really undercuts the story. She doesn’t see herself as having done anything wrong.

I love that Grace is laughing at other people. She’s like, “You are ridiculous.”
Yes! “It’s not me.”

I saw the film back in Cannes and rewatched it not long ago, and at that point there were some eerie parallels with things happening in my own family—I’ve found myself being very much like, “I have to laugh at this first and then we’ll be fine, because nobody else is going to otherwise.”
Totally, I totally get that. The only time that Grace feels like she’s being more self-aware is in the presence of Sissy Spacek’s character Pam, who really sees her. But yeah, families are weird. There’s madness everywhere—and who’s more mad than the other person? There was also something very liberating in making a film about a character who’s willing to go to the edge, who is self-destructive, funny and bold in a way. I saw her as a rebel of some sorts while she’s unraveling. She still feels strong.

You keep such enormous emotion in these small-town settings—even in Ratcatcher, the scale and stakes feel so massive. How do you toy with these environments differently when dealing with domesticity at home versus filming in the US?
The epic is in the everyday, isn’t it? The smallest things are the biggest things: the things that are happening with that in families, your mental health, loneliness, isolation. I always try, wherever I shoot, to find something familiar that I can hold on to that’s universal to everyone. One filmmaker I always loved is Nicolas Roeg, because he was shooting everywhere but still understood that landscape. Shooting in America, I always try to find something familiar to me to find the universal emotion.

Were there any specific things in the landscape, including the house, maybe, that you really latched onto with this film?
I think I felt as trapped in that house as Grace did, to be honest. Shooting a film is absolutely brutal, so you have to find some beauty in it, and there was this beautiful landscape around us. Every day was about finding ways to test myself to make it better and better. I was just always thinking about the experience emotionally.

To move through the brutality, did you feel the film’s humor on set while shooting, in terms of any days feeling lighter—or was it something you only found when watching back in the edit?
It felt lighter on the day, because it was written and intended that way, and it’s to do with comic timing. The young girl who played the cashier, for instance, she hadn’t done much stuff, but she’s really good, so it’s to do with casting as well. I also didn’t want to over-rehearse anything—we just put her in the situation and were quite economical. Finding real comedy is to do with timing, and whatever the situation is. I could tell it worked because the young actress was genuinely taken aback.

We have to talk about the John Prine song, because when you hear it in the film it seems wild to imagine it wasn’t written for you and this exact moment. How did you feel when you heard it for the first time?
I heard it when I was writing the script. Raife Burchell, our music supervisor, sent me that track and I hadn’t heard it before—I loved it. The whole thing about a relationship that is completely knowing the worst things about each other but still loving each other really felt great, and it’s just a brilliant song. I love the way music comes to you. I think you find parallels in the weirdest things. I was just like, ‘Oh, my God, this is kind of what’s underneath it all.’

It’s amazing when it finds you. I have to mention as well, otherwise I’d kick myself—one of my closest friends, her first dance at her wedding was to ‘Dedicated to the One I Love’ because of Morvern Callar.
Oh, my God, I feel really honored about that. I love that track so much, and it was really interesting because it was so in contrast with the rest of the music in the film, and this one is, too.

You’ve credited your mother with showing you so many films throughout your life—I’d love to know which ones have really stayed with you, as well as ones you would love to show your own daughter now as well.
My daughter’s film was The Wizard of Oz. She loved that film and would watch it so many times because it’s so full of imagination. My mum passed away this year, unfortunately. It’s been a really tough year for me. She loved Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life which she watched twenty million times, and All About Eve and Mildred Pierce. What I think my mum really showed me were movies that had really interesting female characters. I think something happened in cinema when censorship came in, where it changed back to these more Doris Day-sort of women, but that influence stayed with me, and that [can be with male characters], too, like with Joaquin [Phoenix] on [You Were Never Really Here]. I like to get very close to my characters, which is maybe what I learned from those films.

There are so many striking images in the film, from the forest to the wedding—which are the ones that feel the strongest to you, that you feel you’ll remember forever?
One of the first ones I imagined was probably Grace falling through the glass, this image of her up against the window, looking at herself, trying to think if she’s still attractive anymore after hearing her husband on the phone and imagining him with someone else. Maybe also Sissy Spacek sleepwalking with a gun at night…

That’ll do it!
That’ll do it. But I think now having seen the film so many times, I can see so many photographs from all of these films. My mind becomes like a kaleidoscope of them all.