Following 2017’s You Were Never Really Here, we recently learned Lynne Ramsay would finally be embarking on her next feature in Canada in just a few weeks. An adaptation of Ariana Harwicz’s 2019 novel Die, My Love, the film follows a mother who struggles to maintain her sanity as she battles with psychosis in a remote rural area.

With Jennifer Lawrence set to lead the project, marking her first since last summer’s comedy No Hard Feelings, she now has a co-star. Robert Pattinson is in talks to join the film, according to Deadline, as his schedule has freed up with The Batman Part II shoot delayed to January.

Ramsay is prepping a shoot in Alberta, Canada from August through October, with cinematography courtesy of Seamus McGarvey, reteaming after We Need to Talk About Kevin, according to IONCINEMA.

“It’s about mental health and the breakdown of a marriage,” said Ramsay last year. “But it’s really fucking funny. At least I think it’s funny… But I’m Glaswegian, so I’ve [got] a really black sense of humor.” Check out the book synopsis below, which brings up comparisons to the work of John Cassavetes, David Lynch, Lars von Trier, and John Ford.

In a forgotten patch of French countryside, a woman is battling her demons – embracing exclusion yet wanting to belong, craving freedom whilst feeling trapped, yearning for family life but at the same time wanting to burn the entire house down. Given surprising leeway by her family for her increasingly erratic behaviour, she nevertheless feels ever more stifled and repressed. Motherhood, womanhood, the banality of love, the terrors of desire, the inexplicable brutality of ‘another person carrying your heart forever’ – Die, My Love faces all this with a raw intensity. It’s not a question of if a breaking point will be reached, but rather when and how violent a form will it take?

This is a brutal, wild book – it’s impossible to come out from reading Ariana Harwicz unscathed. The language of Die, My Love cuts like a scalpel even as it attains a kind of cinematic splendour, evoking the likes of John Cassavetes, David Lynch, Lars von Trier and John Ford. In a text that explores the destabilising effects of passion and its absence, immersed in the psyche of a female protagonist always on the verge of madness, in the tradition of Sylvia Plath and Clarice Lispector, Harwicz moulds language, submitting it to her will in irreverent prose. Bruising and confrontational, yet anchored in an unapologetic beauty and lyricism, Die, My Love is a unique reading experience that quickly becomes addictive.

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