Lynne Ramsay's Die My Love

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Each week, Drew creates a watchlist with film recommendations provided by you.

CELEBRATE last week’s winner.

Sherri M. won mindless movies with her submission, Grease. Holy Olivia Newton-John — you’ve earned an entry into the annual mystery prize lottery!

VOTE this week’s category: N/A.

We took the end of the year off, and so the first vote will be held next week.

SUBMIT for next week’s category: your favorite movie.

Let’s start the new year off with a simple one. Submit your favorite movie to be featured in next week’s vote and increase your odds to win the mystery prize.¹

¹ The mystery prize this year is going to be your very own puppy. That’s right! We’re sending you a puppy! Just kidding. Is there a more prototypical “bad gift” example on the planet? Probably not one that is used as the butt of a joke more often.

Seriously, though: have you thought for a moment what the mystery prize might be? You’ve put a lot of trust that your author (me) and movie curator (Drew) are good gift givers. Though, you really don’t know us very well. Have you even confirmed we are who we say we are? It’s the Internet, after all. We might seem like well-adjusted people who love movies — and therefore most likely to give you a gift card to your local theater or something of the sort.

But, it’s plausible and likely that we’re not who we say we are. It’s more likely that we’re the sorts of people who have been wearing the same pair of sweatpants for several weeks while giving neck-tie energy with LinkedIn posts detailing how we learned a valuable lesson about B2B marketing after hitting a deer with our car on the way home from work one day. In this case, perhaps we’d offer you a free, thirty-minute consultation with us to discuss your career path or the latest works of Mel Robbins. Wouldn’t that be a disappointing gift?

I don’t want to burst anyone’s bubble, but you met us on the Internet.

A spoiler-free description of the movie.

An expecting mother and writer moves to Montana with her husband.

If you like these things, then you’ll like the film.

→ Artsy movies. Die My Love is artsy, but never condescending in the way that these sorts of films can often be. Though, the mouths of film students everywhere are foaming at the prospect of writing their thesis about this movie.

→ Jennifer Lawrence. Is there a metaphysical plane of existence where even one individual doesn’t like Jennifer Lawrence? I’m certain there isn’t. Her career-best performance in this film is a near carnal portrayal of a woman suffering from postpartum depression and psychosis.

→ Imagery that sometimes goes over your head. There’s powerful imagery in this movie and I understood some of it and I think you will too.

What I liked about it.

One might liken viewing Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love to getting Being John Malkovich’d into a woman with severe psychosis. Jennifer Lawrence puts up a career-best performance as Grace — a new mother whose relationship, sex life, and career as a writer are all crumbling underneath the weight of parenthood and a case of postpartum depression. Watching the film gave this viewer feelings of anxiousness, dread, loneliness, sadness, anger, etc. It’s a very lighthearted watch if you are a completely demented lunatic.

It was also the first time in a long while I’ve seen a film use Toni Basil’s Hey Mickey. I quite enjoyed that, so much so that I decided to watch the music video afterwards. Die My Love is leaps and bounds better than the Hey Mickey music video — and many other films released this year, by my estimate.

A fact or two about the production that makes you say “oh, neat.”

→ After reading the book on which the movie is based, Martin Scorcese sent it to Jennifer Lawrence. He read it in a book club with other filmmakers and could immediately envision Lawrence in the leading role.

→ The sex scenes were shot without an intimacy coordinator. Lawrence explained that she and Pattinson felt completely comfortable working without one. While not mandatory, some streaming platforms require coordinators for intimate scenes.

Thoughts completely unrelated to this week’s film.

The Badlands National Park is located in South Dakota. It is home to some of the most torturously desolate landscapes in America. The whole thing is about 380 square miles and when you’re there it feels endless.

Earlier this year, your author trekked out to The Badlands on the way to visit family in the area. My five-year-old asked, not infrequently in the days leading up to the trip, why the area was called The Badlands. “Daddy, are the Badlands B-A-D?”

Kids this age tend to ask these sorts of questions. The ones we’re often too busy to think about. It was a good question, and as it happens, the Badlands are not B-A-D.

Native Americans used the area as a hunting ground for nearly 11,000 years. The plentiful stark changes in elevation inherent in the crumbly terrain made for reasonable campgrounds from which people could hunt and collect game.

The territory earned the name Mako Sica (mako: land; Sica: bad) from the Sioux people predominantly because of its rugged terrain and lack of water. According to the old .gov site, the landscape within the park erodes roughly at a rate of about one inch per year. Your author didn’t confirm this, but I suspect one inch per year is fast, otherwise it wouldn’t be neat.

One of the most surprising parts about the Badlands is the co-existence of the aforementioned jagged clay terrain and lush grasslands, which neighbor the clay formations and are home to a number of prairie dogs that likely qualifies as an infestation.

The prairie dogs are cute, and the “dog” in the name begs the question, can I touch one? Can I pet them? The park service is privy to this idiotic impulse many of us are helpless against, and signage advising against such behavior is plentiful.

What was more striking was the contents of this signage, which informed that the current population of prairie dogs were in the midst of the prairie dog plague. The signs, hard-to-miss at most viewing areas, read something like the following: “PRAIRIE DOG PLAGUE IS HIGHLY CONTAGIOUS. DO NOT TOUCH.”

PDP is caused by the same bacteria that causes the bubonic plague. Symptoms include fever, dehydration, lethargy, loss of appetite, difficulty breathing, swollen lymph nodes, and enlarged spleen. Prairie dogs often die within two to three days of contracting the illness.

The prairie dog plague is leagues and leagues worse than writer’s block, the condition with which your author became hopelessly infected during the production of this edition about Die My Love.

That’s right, I’ve reduced a disease threatening an entire species of prairie dogs to a platform to announce that I had kind-of sort-of a hard time writing this week’s edition of tnmn.

The struggle had every one of my brain cells playing dead until I spoke with my nearly asleep wife before we went to bed one evening. She granted me five minutes to talk about my writer’s block with her under the condition that she had “no obligation to respond but she would try to listen.”

This comically one-sided discussion, during which my wife’s eyes were closed and I talked the entire time, was the birthplace for this brand-spanking-new column: Completely Unrelated.

This is my place to write about things completely unrelated to why you’re probably here (film recommendations, presumably).