Cannes wouldn’t be Cannes without its big, bold misfires. Last year’s festival had plenty—Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez, Paolo Sorrentino’s Parthenope, and David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, to name a few. This year, unfortunately, one of them is Lynne Ramsay’s highly anticipated Die My Love, a raw drama about a woman in the throes of a breakdown, starring Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Pattinson, Sissy Spacek, and LaKeith Stanfield.

Given Ramsay’s acclaimed filmography—Ratcatcher, We Need to Talk About Kevin, You Were Never Really Here—and the star power involved, this seemed like a potential Palme d’Or contender, maybe even an Oscar hopeful. In reality, it’s neither.

The film introduces Grace (Lawrence) and Jackson (Pattinson), a glamorous couple living in a rundown farmhouse inherited from Jackson’s late uncle. Both former New Yorkers with artistic dreams—she wants to write a novel, he wants to record an album—they plan to make the most of their new space. But things don’t go as expected. A frenzied montage shows them dancing wildly and having desperate sex on the floor. Soon, Grace is pregnant, and before long, their son Harry is six months old. Their once-free lives now revolve around the baby, and they’re drifting apart.

As their relationship crumbles, Grace visits Jackson’s troubled mother, Pam (Spacek), who sleepwalks down the highway with a rifle since her husband’s death. Grace also becomes fixated on a biker (Stanfield) who lurks near their home. To make matters worse, Jackson brings home a hyperactive puppy that barks all night while the baby cries—and he sleeps through it all.

The stage is set for a dramatic downward spiral: infidelity, a failed attempt at reconciliation, and then everything falls apart spectacularly.

Yet, there’s no real depth to the chaos. Grace and Jackson scream and fight—their relationship starts at that pitch and stays there—but it’s never clear why, beyond the vague pressures of parenthood and marriage. Their dynamic, central to the film, lacks complexity, and neither character feels fully believable. It’s hard to buy them as exhausted, struggling new parents when they still look like the flawless Dior models they are in real life.

That doesn’t stop Lawrence from going all out. She crawls through grass like a predator, barks at the dog, smashes windows, claws at walls until her nails bleed, and in one surreal moment, absentmindedly paints with her breastmilk after feeding her baby.

These over-the-top performances are Lawrence’s trademark—from Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle to Mother!—and she fully commits to playing a destructive force of nature. But in quieter scenes, her motivations remain puzzling.

Some Cannes critics are already predicting an Oscar campaign for her in 2026. If the narrative of a comeback takes hold (it’s been 12 years since her win and a decade since her last nomination), it’s possible. But Die My Love itself doesn’t live up to its potential.Despite its bizarre nature, her performance is pure Oscar bait. That said, considering Nicole Kidman’s similarly wild and frequently nude role in Babygirl recently missed out on a nomination, it’s far from guaranteed.

Elsewhere, Spacek is entertaining and Pattinson fully commits, but both—like Lawrence—are let down by the script. Adapted loosely from Ariana Harwicz’s novel by Ramsay, playwright Enda Walsh, and Conversations with Friends writer Alice Birch, the film hints at trauma without truly grappling with it. The editing is frenetic, the visuals striking, but none of it can mask the lack of depth.

It’s all empty provocation—a chaotic mess of ideas thrown at the wall, full of sound and fury but ultimately meaningless. The result feels like a more pretentious, arthouse version of Nightbitch, Marielle Heller’s flawed Amy Adams-led film about a mother’s breakdown.

We absolutely need more films exploring the raw, unspoken struggles of motherhood, but Die My Love—a two-hour slog that put half my Cannes screening audience to sleep (impressive for such a loud film)—just isn’t the one.