Die My Love book vs movie: Ariana Harwicz says Lynne Ramsay made it more punk than the novel

Ariana Harwicz published Matate, amor in Argentina in 2012, and the English translation, Die, My Love, came out from Charco Press in 2017. Martin Scorsese read it in his book club, sent it to Jennifer Lawrence's production company, and Lynne Ramsay's film premiered in competition at Cannes on May 17, 2025, before Mubi released it in the US on November 7. Harwicz's verdict isn't the one you'd expect from an author whose book went Hollywood.

She doesn't say Ramsay softened it. She says Ramsay pushed it somewhere else.

What Harwicz thinks of the film

Harwicz gave her most detailed reaction to Infobae two days before the US release. She called the film her novel "with the director's gaze," and described that gaze as "more radical, more punk, thought out from the music." That matches what she told Airmail's Lily Meyer: watching it felt as if Ramsay had "turned up the volume," as if the story were a punk record.

"It's neither praise nor criticism, but I think Lynne made a different choice."

— Ariana Harwicz, to Infobae (translated from Spanish)

Her reservations are about rhythm, not attitude:

• The structure: Her novel, she said, has "more back-and-forth," built on alternating humor and tragedy. In the film, "everything is downhill or uphill, toward madness."
• The humor: She would have liked the film to explore the contrast between tragedy and humor a little more.
• The supporting cast: The film puts less weight on secondary characters. Ramsay, in her words, opted for something like "a philosophical treatise."
• The language: The novel is "very Argentine in its language and very French." The film swaps that for an American imaginary of comedies and marital fights.

She's unreserved about the star. Harwicz called Lawrence's performance "extraordinary" and credited her with the choice of director: according to Harwicz, Lawrence told Scorsese the film had to be directed by a woman. In December, on Mubi's podcast, she summed the whole thing up, as reported by Perfil: "The film is imperfect, but it doesn't make concessions."

What Ramsay was going for

Ramsay, for her part, told Film Comment she didn't want to make a postpartum film. She called it "a bonkers, crazy love story," and said she wanted to put some humor in.

Harwicz wanted more of the novel's jokes. Ramsay says she added jokes. They're both describing the same film.

She also explained the move to America in practical terms. She saw the country as a set of different countries, and for her characters, the reason to end up in the middle of nowhere was simple: "The characters get this free house, so they take it."

Book vs movie: what changed

The bones of the novel are all in the film. The details around them moved:

• The setting: The novel's unnamed foreign narrator lives in a converted dairy farmhouse in rural France. The film's Grace (Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson) leave New York for a house Jackson inherited from his uncle in rural Montana. Jackson's mother, Pam (Sissy Spacek), tells Grace the uncle killed himself inside it.
• The names: In the book, nobody has one. The narrator, her husband and her son stay anonymous, and she calls the husband "my love." The film names everyone, and Jackson ends up naming the baby Harry, after his late father.
• The father-in-law: The novel's father-in-law keeps a rifle by his bed and dies in his sleep partway through. The film's Harry (Nick Nolte) dies before the baby is born.
• The lover: The book's neighbor is a radiologist with a daughter who has severe disabilities, and he watches the narrator from his motorcycle. The film turns him into Karl (LaKeith Stanfield), a married man who rides past the house.
• The diagnosis: In the book, the narrator does a stay in residential treatment. In the film, Jackson has Grace committed, and a psychiatrist traces her behavior to abandonment issues after her parents died when she was a child.
• The wedding: The film's last act runs through Jackson's proposal and a wedding reception where Jackson leaves Grace dancing alone and she smashes her head into a mirror.

Two scenes made it across almost untouched. The dog, hit by a car and shot by the narrator after her husband refuses, is in both. So is the glass door: after a fight over condoms she finds in the car, she crashes through the patio door she'd been fantasizing about breaking. Airmail's Meyer noted the scene comes straight from the book, soundtrack aside.

The ending

This is where the two versions split hardest. In the novel, the narrator comes home from treatment, fights with everyone, and drives without a license to the radiologist's house, where she falls asleep in an armchair. Her husband turns up, the two men seem to reach an understanding, and the couple laughs about the radiologist's wife expecting twins. Then she leaves the car and disappears into the undergrowth.

Ramsay keeps the walk into the trees and turns up the volume on it. Back from the hospital, Grace finds the house remodeled and a new car in the driveway. On a drive she tells Jackson he doesn't see her, kisses him, says "Enough" and walks into the forest. She burns her journal, takes off her dress and walks toward a spreading fire while Jackson watches.

Harwicz's narrator vanishes into the undergrowth laughing about the neighbor's twins. Ramsay's Grace walks into a wildfire. That's the "more punk" Harwicz was talking about.

How it landed

Critics mostly sided with Lawrence, who earned a Golden Globe nomination for best actress in a drama, and split on Ramsay. Audiences were rougher: opening-night viewers gave the film a D+ CinemaScore. Mubi paid a reported $24 million after Cannes for rights across North America, Latin America and other territories. The film went on to gross $12.2 million worldwide in theaters, which still made it Ramsay's biggest box office hit, before landing on Mubi's streaming service on December 23.

Don't miss: Why did Snow turn evil in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes? Tom Blyth says it happened in three stages

Harwicz, meanwhile, keeps calling the film a different choice rather than a betrayal. For a writer who, as Infobae put it, paid for the book's publication out of her own pocket, that's a generous review of a $24 million Cannes buy, and it's honest about the one thing she misses: the jokes between the breakdowns.

Previously we wrote: Mansfield Park is Jane Austen's least-loved novel. Russell Brand's sentence just made it her most relevant