DRAMA; 1hr 58min
STARRING: Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Pattinson, Sissy Spacek, Nick Nolte
Hands-on: Lawrence and Pattinson
When aspiring novelist Grace (Lawrence) and her husband, Jackson (Pattinson), relocate from NYC to his home ground of rural Montana, being young, hot and in love, they should by rights have everything going for them. That would be their rosy plan, which fails to account for the postpartum psychosis into which depressed new mother Grace slip-slides.
With an ocean of time on her hands and too much solitude in which to handle it, having lost the incentive to write, Grace sinks with feral relish into the prison of herself. She turns with supreme bitchery on a chatty convenience-store clerk. She imagines prowling the desolate countryside at night with a knife. Like a self-immolating missile, she is hell-bent on a course that can only take her one way. Bit by ramshackle bit, the couple’s house resembles a crime scene, its reflective unravelling not helped by Jackson’s impulsive adoption of a prime contender for the world’s most annoying dog.
Jackson is no asset, either, with his work-related absences doing who knows what, his hot-button temper, the threat of his infidelity and his feverishly martyred attitude. His well-meaning mother, Pam (Spacek), has lost her husband (Nolte) to dementia and would love to lend Grace a hand, but Grace has gone beyond anybody’s help. Sexually starved, fixated and seething, she is intent on shredding every safety net.
Director Lynne Ramsay (We Need to Talk About Kevin) orchestrates this metamorphosis with the poetic self-assurance of an empath who has prowled the depths of psychological torment. She has a boundless supply of it to work with in her, Enda Walsh and Alice Birch’s adaptation of Ariana Harwicz’s 2012 novel, whose gathering darkness Lawrence eats alive.
