In director Lynn Ramsay’s latest film, Die, My Love (2025), female subjects are unapologetically unhinged- caught in a delirium of desire, drudgery and grief. While the trope of maternal exhaustion and suffocating ennui of suburban child-rearing is not new – Ramsay’s 2011 masterpiece, We Need to Talk About Kevin or Maggie Gyllenhaal’s ferociously effective, The Lost Daughter (2021) – the abjection, repulsion and ultimately, an emotional incineration of the young mother and her grieving mother-in-law in Die, My Love, affords a rare gerontological interrogation. To be sure, while the film’s primary focus stays with the unrelenting fever dream of Grace’s dissatisfaction and her gradual descent into psychosis (the young maternal subject, played brilliantly by Jennifer Lawrence), it is the arc of the older mother-in-law that is equally interesting (played with tender yet unfiltered raw emotion by Sissy Spacek). In fact, there is an uncanny intergenerational connection between the two women, whose lives are tethered to the compulsiveness of routines—one as a young mother to a newborn, the other as an older caregiver to a spouse suffering from dementia—and to the seeming impossibility of moving on. In what follows, I draw on Kristeva’s (1982; 2003) analysis of the abject to describe the contradictions and the blurring of life stages that undergird female subjectivities.

The plot
The movie begins with Grace and her male partner, Jackson, as they move to the countryside and settle into a house inherited from an older relative. There is nothing particularly ‘idyllic’ about their country life. The house—creaky, messy, and dated—almost mirrors the emotional weight carried by the characters. Vast swathes of tall, unruly grass, an unkempt barn, swarming bugs, and dream-like horses that gallop briefly into view only to disappear into the dark woods. Soon, the couple has a baby, and things shift quickly. Grace is often left alone with the child while Jackson hits the road for some unspecified “work.” During the day, brain-fogged from post-partum depression and boredom, Grace juggles baby rattles and oranges, spits beer, and wanders around the house clutching a kitchen knife. At night, still waiting for her partner to return, she drifts through the grey woods under endless night skies. Nothing seems able to soothe her sense of emptiness and confinement.

Running alongside this is the quiet presence of the older mother-in-law, Pam—perhaps the only one who truly recognises Grace’s struggles. She offers help, but she herself is reeling from the recent death of her long-time spouse. “Nothing seems real,” Pam laments about life after his passing. The unrealness of life without the discipline of caregiving stands in sharp contrast to Grace’s suffocating claustrophobia; yet for both women, the sense of unreality is unmistakably palpable. Often during the nights, Pam sleepwalks onto the bare, moonlit roads of rural Montana, rambling and laughing hysterically to herself, all the while carrying a vintage rifle inherited from her now-dead spouse. It is only when she reaches a certain crossroad that she realises how far she has wandered from the house. She walks back home at a forlorn pace, dazed and dishevelled.

There is nothing beautiful or soothing in the portrayal of the characters in the film, as both women increasingly become reckless and socially unpalatable. “We never get a break from Grace’s perspective” (O’Malley comments in her review on rogerebert.com), while Pam struggles to maintain her emotional agency. The ending is vague, visceral and suffocating, where everything going up in flames appears to be the only way to breathe and live. 

Intergenerational blurring of the feminine abject
While anxieties around old age and the moral panic of the leaky, incontinent body have increasingly demanded biomedical interventions (e.g., the anti-ageing, rejuvenation, and life-extension industries), the metaphor of the abject captures these inherent tensions. Feminist philosopher and critic Julia Kristeva’s (1982) theoretical provocation of the abject offers a powerful template to move beyond the typical “horror hag” genre—often associated with the ageing feminine body—toward emergent possibilities for age-defiant discourses of female subjectivity. Crucially, Kristeva’s description of the mother as a birthing subject—a body that leaks, dispels, and transgresses—finds an unusual resonance with the ageing (female) body: one that is often deemed disorderly, frail, and uncontrollable, evoking a sense of disgust (see Gilleard and Higgs’ (2011) use of the term in understanding the cultural dichotomy of the “third age” versus the “fourth age”). Pickard (2020) explains this tension through the figure of the hag—a persistent cultural representation of the ageing body as decaying, psychologically unstable, and caught in a state of flux. Building on Creed’s (1993) depiction of the hag as both pitiful and terrifying—or as woman-as-monster and woman-as-victim at once—Pickard (2020) argues for the transgressive possibility of mediating a shift from an oppressed or fragmented feminine subject position to one that is resurgent and powerful.

The ambiguity of life stage and agency associated with female subjectivity echoes powerfully in Ramsay’s treatment of Die, My Love. Grace’s young yet birthing body, one she both repulses and embraces, is caught in the excesses of fluids: blood, breast milk, and vaginal discharge. This unruly dispersal echoes the imagined aesthetics of the ageing body—rotting, withering, and incontinent. Seen this way, abjectification opens up the possibility of age-blurring, since both young and old female subjects are embedded within a gendered system that defines identity through reproductive and bodily capacities. Yet Grace and Pam remain strikingly unflinching in the face of their bodily ‘failings’ and psychological instability, producing a rare blurring of generation and gender. The film refuses to diagnose either woman’s deviance, instead allowing them to rise and fall with the body’s primal demands—lust, grief, hunger, and sleep. In doing so, it offers a rare experiment in mainstream cinema, where women at opposite ends of the age spectrum defy patriarchal regulation through deviance, indiscretion, and abjection.

References:

Creed, B. (1993). The monstrous-feminine: Film, feminism, psychoanalysis. Routledge.

Gilleard, C., & Higgs, P. (2011). Ageing, abjection and embodiment in the fourth age. Journal of Aging Studies, 25(2), 135–142.

Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers of horror: An essay on abjection (L. S. Roudiez, Trans.). Columbia University Press.

Kristeva, J. (2003). Approaching abjection. In A. Jones (Ed.), The feminism and visual culture reader (pp. 389–391). Routledge.

Pickard, S. (2020). On becoming a hag: Gender, ageing and abjection. Feminist Theory, 21(2), 157–173.

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Tannistha Samanta is a Senior Research Fellow with ICAS: MP (New Delhi), German Ministry of Research, Technology and Space. Her research covers family studies, medical sociology, critical STS and theory development in social gerontology, with a focus on South Asia.