Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love is possibly her most experimental film to date. Revolving around a rural Montana housewife, Grace (Jennifer Lawrence), who is experiencing postpartum psychosis, it hews as close to performance art as to cinema. Like much performance art, there’s an element of physical endurance, both for the characters and for the actors, as Grace, her husband Jackson (Robert Pattinson) and her baby enter a kingdom of three, exhilarating and claustrophobic in equal measure, while the rest of the world recedes beyond imagination. This anarchic entity of mother-child-father is cramped by Ramsay’s square frame ratio but also reframed by it in novel and unexpected ways, as Grace continually searches for both physical and psychological lines of flight, venturing into the surrounding landscape and deep into her own psyche in an effort to come to terms with her condition. At times the highly dissociative quality feels like Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon played out as a feature film, and it is quite an exhausting watch in one sitting.

The focus on postpartum psychosis, rather than depression, reminded me of a comment that Rachel Cusk makes in her work of autofiction Kudos, to the effect that for a woman to have a child is witness the death of her body, and that motherhood is a continuous testament to that death. In Die My Love, that morbidity plays out as both a search for vitality and an intensified death drive, a series of animalistic trajectories that seem to occur at the threshold of (human) life and death, whether it’s Grace crawling from the kitchen to the grass outside, feeling herself with a knife, wrapping herself around Jackson naked, communicating with her father-in-law Harry (Nick Nolte) entirely through physical gestures, or tracking increasingly oblique and elliptical trajectories around and out of her house: “Ive been stuck between wanting to do something and not wanting to do anything at all.” With so much time alone, her only company is her baby and her own body, and the two quickly fuse, as when she cuts herself, flinches, and watches her blood mix with her breast milk.

Like Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, this intense embodiment gives way to a kind of cosmic horror in which Grace’s body becomes a portal to the entire universe. It’s as if she has shrunk so much into herself that her psyche has expanded proportionately to the reaches of time and space that are most distant from the constraints of her Montana farm. When Grace cuts herself in the scene described above, Ramsay shifts from the splatter of blood and milk to Grace and Jackson gazing at the stars through a telescope in their garden, communing with a primal femininity that percolates the galaxy. This cosmicity turns horrific via the volatility of the skin, the sense that it is about to erupt with something deeply alien, and this is perhaps clearest during one of the most surreal night scenes, when Grace waltzes slowly with father-in-law Harry as he runs his hands over her belly, before Ramsay cuts to Jackson sobbing as he kneels and holds her stomach. While Grace’s baby is the alien presence that has entered her world, her womb seems equally uncanny – it is the ongoing connective tissue between them, the continuum between their bodies, that produces the strangeness, which is perhaps why she can’t bear to give her son a proper name of his own.

Caught between the house and the cosmos, between her own body and the part of it that has left her, Grace can only find rest in motion, which means that much of the film plays as a series of montage sequences, in which she crawls, arranges oranges on her belly, plays the harmonica, licks the windows, sits in the fridge, spits out beer, barks at the dog, and cradles the baby in her arms while vinyl plays in the background. Throughout all of these trajectories, Grace seems to be recalibrating her proprioceptive limits, sometimes languorously and sometimes violently, in an effort to reconceive the threshold between self and other, personal space and worldspace, in the wake of her pregnancy. She can never quite see herself or imagine herself as a distinct entity – the film continually recurs to a corona in the centre of her vision as she gazes at a local lake, most notably when she comes up against a mirror in a hotel room, a reflection of herself that is not tethered to her family home, inducing her to dance, feel her skin, and eventually smash her head against it. As this destruction of the mirror, primal metaphor for the gaze, might suggest, the very syntax of traditional film seems to be complicit in the self-other distinction that motherhood disrupts, meaning that Ramsay has to mine the history of film even deeper than Deren to provide a visual lexicon, as when Grace pivots a pen on a collection of Muybridge chronophotography.

For all those reasons, Grace often reminded me of Barbara Loden’s Wanda if she was prevented from wandering – and the closest she gets to Wanda is in her perpetual walks across town, pushing her pram, to the house of mother-in-law Pam, played by Sissy Spacek. The two women have an unspoken physical bond, since Pam’s first year as a widow coincides with Grace’s first year as a mother. For Pam, nothing has seemed real since her husband died and she reassures Grace that she understands her psychosis too: “Everybody gets out of the loop in the first year…you’ll come back.” The haziest, most luminous and phantasmagorical of the night scenes – the most vivid line of flight into the supernatural – details the moment when Grace and Pam meet halfway between their houses, and share the burden of Grace’s ceaseless wandering. Pam comes armed with a gun and Grace with a knife, walking towards each other through the fields like a bad dream after watching Badlands on late night television. This, in turn, gives way to a giant alien baby walking towards Grace as she lies on her back watching the sky, the strangest moment in the film.

Unfortunately this surrealism drops off quite a bit in the second half of the film, giving way to a more naturalistic domestic drama. It’s here that Die My Love starts to feel like endurance acting and watching, and the performance art of the first half dilutes into a more conventional actorliness. In one scene, when the couple take a road trip, Ramsay aims for a visceral escalation – Grace screams to herself, Jackson beeps the horn and bangs the steering wheel, the dog barks in the back seat, Grace almost breaks into laughter, Jackson hits a horse, the dog runs away, and finally he shock urinates against a tree. To some extent, this scene works because it suggests that the couple, like Grace herself, can only make sense of their lives, and properly converse with each, when they’re in motion, even or especially if that motion intensifies dangerously quickly. But it still lacks some of the strangeness of the first half of the film, in large part because it returns to a more discernible narrative structure after the freeform experimentalism of those opening scenes. Still, the ending is powerfully imagistic – Grace receiving a “Mommy’s Home” cake after being discharged from a mental health ward and instantly fantasising about lighting a forest fire (or perhaps actually lighting it?) in a testament to the conflagratory audacity that drives Ramsay’s oeuvre as a whole.