Adaptation note: This essay is adapted from Episode 33 of the author’s Turkish-language CultPost podcast, released in early 2026. It has been translated and edited for international readers while preserving the original argument, theoretical framework, examples, and personal perspective.

Spoiler warning: This essay discusses major events throughout Die My Love, including its ending.

Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love (2025), starring Jennifer Lawrence as Grace and Robert Pattinson as Jackson, offers a striking account of motherhood, desire, and psychological disintegration. Adapted from Argentine writer Ariana Harwicz’s novel of the same name, the film follows a couple who move from New York to an inherited house in rural Montana and have a child. Their new life initially appears to promise intimacy and renewal. Instead, parenthood intensifies the fractures in their relationship and draws Grace into an experience that neither her family nor the institutions around her can adequately recognize.

The film has often been discussed in relation to postpartum mental health. That context is important, but Ramsay does not present Grace as a transparent clinical case whose behavior can be explained through a single diagnosis. Her experience remains unsettlingly ambiguous. I therefore approach the film through the concept of the abject, drawing especially on feminist psychoanalysis and poststructuralist feminism. This framework helps illuminate not only Grace’s bodily and emotional disintegration, but also the social process through which a woman who fails to perform ideal motherhood is rendered unintelligible.

Parenthood Beyond the Success Narrative

Having a child is a profound turning point in a relationship. This can be especially destabilizing for people accustomed to individualized urban lives, personal freedom, and the ability to organize their time largely around themselves. Parenthood reorganizes intimacy, work, sleep, domestic labor, sexuality, and each partner’s relationship to their own body. Yet the difficulties produced by this transformation are rarely given the same visibility as its celebratory dimensions.

I write this as a father as well as an academic and social scientist. I have previously examined changing representations of fatherhood through the concept of dadvertising, and my own experience inevitably informs how I respond to a film about parenthood. At the same time, I do not want to place my experience at the center of Grace’s story. The gendered distribution of care remains crucial. Even in families that regard themselves as progressive, fathers’ contributions to childcare and domestic work are often limited, leaving women to manage the child, the home, and frequently paid employment as well.

When this burden is shared, it is often shared with other women: grandmothers, nannies, or domestic workers. Such assistance depends on extended-family relationships and on economic and class privilege. In educated middle-class households, moreover, the child can become a major “project,” surrounded by extensive planning, expert advice, developmental goals, and anxieties about making every decision correctly. Care becomes not only emotionally and physically demanding but also a continuous form of management.

Parenthood is never solely the private experience of two people. It is also a social institution. In many cultural settings, having a child is treated as an achievement, a sign of maturity, or evidence that one is progressing properly through life. Motherhood in particular is presented as a woman’s path to completion and self-realization. Once parenthood is framed in this way, accounts of pregnancy, birth, and childcare are expected to take the form of success stories.

Birth becomes a celebration, while parenthood is represented as an experience from which one should derive constant happiness. In a media culture organized around visibility, performance, and the display of wellbeing, having a child can become a spectacle. Baby showers, gender-reveal parties, carefully staged birth announcements, and the documentation of every developmental milestone turn family life into aesthetic and shareable content. Social media—especially Instagram—can make the postpartum period look as though it has been produced in a studio: the photographs are immaculate, the body appears undisturbed, and emotional exhaustion remains outside the frame.

These practices do not simply make a child visible. They can aestheticize, mediatize, and commercialize childhood, gradually turning the child into an instrument through which adults perform identity, happiness, and social status. Meanwhile, the labor that sustains the image disappears.

Within this success narrative, saying that parenthood is difficult becomes socially risky. A mother who admits that she is struggling may quickly be accused of insufficient love, incompetence, or bad motherhood. Yet loving a child and finding the work of caring for that child difficult are not contradictory experiences. They can—and frequently do—exist at the same time.

Mainstream film and television also tend to conceal the everyday organization of care. Children appear to grow through an invisible labor process. Parents go out, pursue careers, sustain friendships, and preserve their romantic lives almost as easily as they did before the child arrived. We rarely see who feeds the baby, who wakes during the night, who cancels professional obligations, or who absorbs the emotional strain. The adults remain coherent, stable, self-controlled subjects.

Die My Love interrupts that fantasy. It shows what occurs when the subject cannot remain coherent and when maternity does not produce the culturally required image of fulfillment. This is where the abject becomes essential.

What Is the Abject?

The abject is difficult to define because it unsettles the categories through which definition usually operates. It is neither simply an object nor fully a subject. It occupies a border between the two, and its disturbing power comes precisely from this instability.

Translations of the term often emphasize disgust, rejection, degradation, waste, or exclusion. Each captures part of its meaning, but none is sufficient. The abject is not merely something ugly or repulsive. It is whatever disturbs the boundary of the self, making it uncertain where “I” end and what is “not I” begins.

Julia Kristeva developed this concept most influentially in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. In her psychoanalytic account, abjection occurs when the distinction between subject and object begins to collapse. Blood, bodily fluids, birth, death, and decay disturb us because they are simultaneously part of us and no longer containable as us. They expose the body as open, material, and vulnerable rather than closed and autonomous.

Kristeva’s formulation can also be placed alongside Mikhail Bakhtin’s account of the grotesque body. The grotesque body is not smooth, sealed, and idealized; it leaks, sweats, vomits, gives birth, changes, and crosses its own boundaries. Both approaches challenge the fantasy of an intact body, although Kristeva places the crisis more explicitly within the formation and destabilization of the subject.

For Kristeva, the abject must be expelled so that a stable identity can emerge, yet it can never be removed completely. It persists at the border and threatens to return. Abjection is therefore not simply an encounter with an unpleasant external thing. It is an affective and bodily crisis generated from within the conditions of subjectivity itself.

Judith Butler gives this problem a more explicitly political formulation in Bodies That Matter. Social norms do not recognize every body, identity, or way of living as equally intelligible. They establish the boundaries of legitimate personhood while producing a domain of bodies and lives that appear improper, unthinkable, or unlivable.

A distinction I find useful here is the difference between being abject and being abjected. The first, closer to Kristeva’s emphasis, names an internal dissolution of the subject’s boundaries. The second draws attention to a social and political process: normative power actively casts certain people, bodies, desires, and experiences outside the field of recognition. Queer bodies, migrants, people who fall outside accepted mental-health norms, and mothers judged “inappropriate” can all be abjected in this sense.

Jacques Lacan’s concept of the symbolic order also helps clarify the stakes. The symbolic is the domain of language, law, and social norms—the structures through which identities become meaningful and recognizable. Those who cannot be sustained within this order may be made invisible or classified as pathological. Abjection thus concerns both an intimate disturbance of identity and the social mechanisms through which some forms of existence are denied legitimacy.

Representing the abject is not automatically critical or emancipatory. Images of bodily difference, psychological crisis, or uncontrolled femininity can reinforce misogyny and legitimize violence. Narratives of genocide or extreme violence can aestheticize suffering; representations of women as dangerous, irrational, or uncontrollable can reproduce the very hierarchies they appear to expose. Showing abjection is therefore not enough. The political question is how the representation positions the abjected person and the viewer.

At the same time, abjection can become a counter-narrative when it makes visible lives and experiences that dominant culture has excluded. George Gerbner and Larry Gross used the idea of symbolic annihilation to describe the consequences of absence from the representational world of television; Gaye Tuchman later developed the concept in feminist media studies through the categories of omission, trivialization, and condemnation. What media consistently fails to represent is denied social presence.

Mainstream culture repeatedly offers subjects who are stable, self-accepting, productive, and under control. Exhaustion, contradiction, bodily leakage, and emotional collapse are either removed from view or quickly resolved. Abjection is filtered, sanitized, or transformed into spectacle. A film that refuses this sanitization can disturb the ideological fantasy of the unified self. It may disgust, shock, or unsettle the viewer, but that discomfort can reveal that what is called “normal” is neither natural nor universal.

The House as an Uncanny Space

Grace and Jackson move into an old Montana house that Jackson inherits from his uncle. For Jackson, the house connects him to family history and to a place of belonging. For Grace, it is alien, neglected, and oppressively quiet. Their move initially carries the romance of beginning again, but the house never fully becomes a secure home. Its deterioration and isolation create an uncanny atmosphere before Grace’s crisis becomes explicit.

After the baby is born, the instability embodied by the house becomes increasingly visible in Grace’s body and behavior. She moves through the home naked. Jackson asks why she is not wearing shorts, treating her body as a breach of ordinary domestic conduct. She throws herself through glass, breaks objects, and harms herself. These moments are not merely isolated shocks. They indicate the failure of the boundaries that are meant to keep body, home, and identity intact.

Grace is also a writer, and Jackson expects her to write. Yet she cannot produce the work that would make her confinement appear meaningful or productive. His question—why are you not writing?—expresses a familiar social demand: even breakdown must generate an acceptable result. Maternal isolation might be tolerated if it became art, professional accomplishment, or a story of resilience. Grace’s inability to convert her experience into productivity makes her disintegration still less legible.

The film’s visual treatment of her body is important. Grace’s nudity does not function primarily as the polished erotic display associated with the conventional male gaze. Her body is disordered, exposed, desiring, and uncontrolled. It confronts the viewer with unease rather than offering itself as a stable object of pleasure. In this sense, it becomes abject: a body that refuses the boundaries imposed on maternal femininity.

The Family Order Rejects Grace

The dog Jackson brings home can be read as a symbol of the ordinary family arrangement he wants to establish. A pet conventionally completes the image of domestic life, yet this dog barks persistently at Grace. The creature associated with familial normality does not accept her; it responds to her as though she does not belong. After the dog is injured and Jackson refuses to end its suffering, Grace shoots it herself. Her action takes the conflict between her and the household’s imagined order to an irreversible point.

At a social gathering, Grace again violates the codes that regulate acceptable behavior. Her conversation unsettles the other guests, she removes her clothes, and she jumps into the pool. Jackson’s response—that she has embarrassed them—reveals that the conflict is not only about her private distress. Grace has broken the rules of public intelligibility. She has made visible what the social setting requires everyone to contain.

The wedding sequence offers an even clearer inversion of normative imagery. In contemporary media, a wedding frequently represents completion, unity, and public happiness. Grace and Jackson marry, and the ritual appears to confirm their relationship. Immediately afterward, however, Grace is alone and disintegrating in the bridal suite. Jackson is absent. She asks a hotel employee to come to the room and sing for her, dances alone, and then strikes her head against a mirror.

The sequence empties the wedding of its conventional promise. Rather than shared happiness, it gives us isolation; rather than a coherent couple, it gives us an abandoned and fractured subject. Grace’s encounter with the employee is not presented simply as moral deviance. It acts as a boundary violation that exposes the distance between the wedding image and the emotional reality it conceals.

Sexual desire is central to this conflict. Grace wants sex and continues to experience herself as a desiring person, but Jackson repeatedly withdraws. Her masturbation and her fantasies about another man make visible a form of maternal sexuality that dominant culture often treats as incompatible with “proper” motherhood. The mother is expected to direct her body toward nurture and care, not toward unruly personal desire. By refusing this separation, Grace becomes abject both bodily and socially.

Her violent acts—throwing herself through glass, smashing the bathroom, injuring herself—should therefore be read as more than signs of individual instability. They externalize an affective dissolution. The borders between anger and desire, love and resentment, care and suffocation cease to hold. Grace loves her child, but that love does not restore her to the idealized maternal subject society expects.

From Intimate Crisis to Institutional Abjection

When Grace is committed to a psychiatric institution, abjection acquires an institutional form. A psychiatrist interprets her experience through “abandonment issues” connected to the deaths of her parents in a plane crash. Because Grace is not a fully reliable narrator, the status of this explanation remains uncertain. More importantly, the institutional language attempts to convert her crisis into a recognizable personal history.

Grace is also told that she has difficulty bonding with Jackson and the baby. She rejects this judgment: she loves her child and does not understand herself as a mother incapable of attachment. This distinction is crucial. Her love for the child does not prevent her from feeling confined, sexually frustrated, isolated, or overwhelmed. Yet the social order cannot easily accommodate these experiences at once. It therefore translates her refusal of ideal motherhood into deficient maternal attachment.

Grace is not only abject in Kristeva’s sense, as someone experiencing the collapse of her own boundaries. She is also abjected in Butler’s political sense: family and institution combine to designate her as an unintelligible and improper mother.

Jackson remains closer to the normative order. He is not emotionally stable in any uncomplicated sense, and the film does not absolve him. His distance from Grace, his absences, and the possibility of infidelity all contribute to the relationship’s disintegration. Nevertheless, he retains greater access to social recognition. His failures remain compatible with a familiar masculine role, while Grace’s behavior places her outside legitimate femininity and motherhood.

When Grace returns from the institution, the house has been cleaned, repaired, and repainted. Jackson has even named their previously unnamed baby. The surface suggests recovery: the disorder has been removed and the family can begin again. Yet this restoration has taken place without Grace. It is less a resolution than an attempt to cover the crisis with domestic order.

Nothing fundamental has been resolved. At the welcome-home gathering, praise for how “healthy” and “well” Grace looks reduces recovery to an acceptable appearance. She cannot remain within this performance. In the final sequence, she burns the writing through which her experience might have been contained, removes her dress, and walks toward the forest fire. The film does not offer a reassuring return to family life. Fire consumes the fantasy that the social order can be restored simply by repainting the walls and declaring Grace well.

The Cinematic Politics of Discomfort

I would not describe Die My Love as conventional body horror. Ramsay does not build its account of abjection around spectacular bodily transformation of the kind familiar from that genre. Abjection functions instead as an atmosphere: a persistent sensation of leakage, unease, affective excess, and dissolving boundaries.

Most importantly, the film centers the maternal body without reducing it to the binary of good mother and bad mother. Grace is neither an idealized victim nor a simple object of condemnation. Her behavior can be frightening and destructive, but the film does not treat moral judgment as an adequate explanation. It confronts us with a subject who cannot maintain the wholeness that Western thought and popular culture so often demand.

The coherent, autonomous, stable self is one of modern culture’s most powerful myths. Encounters with the abject attract and frighten us because they expose how fragile that myth is. Grace’s experience disturbs the viewer precisely because it cannot be sterilized into an uplifting account of maternal fulfillment or a straightforward story of individual pathology.

This discomfort is politically meaningful. The viewer encounters motherhood and parenthood without the filters that usually make them presentable: without the immaculate social-media image, the invisible care work, or the compulsory success narrative. The film does not claim that Grace’s experience represents all mothers. Rather, it makes room for contradictions that prevailing representations suppress—the possibility that love can coexist with exhaustion, that care can coexist with resentment, and that motherhood does not erase sexuality or the desire for freedom.

By rendering these contradictions visible, Die My Love becomes more than a portrait of one woman’s breakdown. It exposes the social conditions that decide which maternal experiences can be spoken, which bodies may appear, and which forms of distress are classified as failures. Films that make the abject visible can therefore do more than unsettle us. At their most powerful, they expand the field of recognizable experience and allow us to imagine forms of existence beyond the polished boundaries of the “normal.”