Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay’s long-awaited fifth feature, “Die My Love” poses a provocative question under the guise of a mental health crisis: can a wild woman be domesticated? Immediately, she hints at her answer, but the audience doesn’t know it yet. We watch a young couple, Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson) move into a new home and start to play house. What happens after that is so wild and unpredictable that we almost forget that where it ends up is where it was always going.

“Die My Love” is the product of the union between three daring women: Jennifer Lawrence, star and producer, writer Ariana Harwicz, whose 2012 novel about a young mother spinning out in rural France Lawrence received from Martin Scorsese, and Ramsay, a visionary artist of intensely evocative imagery; an unyielding architect of cinematic despair and joy in equal measure. Ramsay adapted the novel with Enda Walsh and Alice Birch, and directed, with Lawrence in the lead role. The result is a ragged primal scream of a film — not a cry for help, but rather, a bellow of maternal rage.

Grace is a writer. In their new home, the house where his Uncle Frank lived and died, Jackson suggests she write “the Great American Novel,” while he might record an album. The possibilities are somehow endless in this decrepit, abandoned house, which they fill with their young life, including baby Harry.

But the only ink Grace spills there is an abstract galaxy, spattered across a page mixed with her own breast milk, a creative output that blends her two identities, now at war. She can’t write, can’t create, aside from her own son, can’t nurture. All she can do is destroy.

One of the first indelible images Ramsay conjures is of Grace crawling through the grass, wielding a large knife, carelessly batting overgrown weeds, while Jackson swigs from a bottle of beer, baby Harry bouncing next to a grocery store birthday cake. It’s a happy, if rumpled 6-month birthday celebration, a scene of seemingly contented but strange domesticity that thrums with an uneasy air of danger.

Grace’s playfully feral wantonness is funny and bewitching, but her schtick loses its luster for Jackson, who takes a job that keeps him away from home, leaving her with the baby. When he doesn’t respond to her entreaties she lashes out: sarcastic, petulant, loose-limbed and impulsive, like a child.

She is under-stimulated, restless, and losing her mind. He is immature (he brings home a random dog) and ill-equipped to handle the angry goddess he finds himself sleeping next to — at least he’s appropriately awed by and afraid of her. His mother Pam (Sissy Spacek), grieving her husband and navigating her own loss of identity as a wife, assures Grace that going “a little loopy” is normal in the first year. But Pam could never anticipate how loopy Grace will get.

She’s deep in the throes of postpartum psychosis, either horny or hallucinating, and often both, a harrowing surreality into which Ramsay plunges us. We can never really tell what’s “real” in “Die My Love,” a film where where timelines and dreamscapes and memories and fantasy collapse in on themselves again and again, but it’s real to Grace, and that’s all that matters, cinematically.

This is a symbolic, emotional and physical journey through a woman’s broken subconscious; a subjective voyage, not a logical one. Her mind disconnected, Grace revels in her body: dancing, crawling, masturbating restlessly just to feel something, fantasizing about a mysterious biker (LaKeith Stanfield) who drives past their house. Driven only by impulse and id, what makes sense to Grace is play, sex, pain, love, adrenaline.

Lawrence and Pattinson are both incredible physical actors, existing wholly in their bodies here. Lawrence propels herself through space like a woman possessed, and Ramsay underscores her mysterious inner drive with music and rhythm, letting songs illustrate Grace’s moods and whims, from the innocent to the romantic to the punishing.

This film is not an easy watch, provoking anxiety, discomfort and even judgment about parenting and motherhood. Her love for her son is never in question, but Grace is a wild animal, and it is at times terrifying to be asked to dive into the cracked psyche of a brilliant but troubled mind with such immediacy and presence. How do you solve a problem like Grace? You can’t. She’s not a problem that wants to be solved.

Ramsay assembles Lawrence’s fearsome and fully embodied performance, sound, image, and this story of frustrated female pain into a pile of tinder and then lights a match. When Grace finally takes a clear-eyed look at what’s available to her in this situation, she burns it all down, and the incendiary “Die My Love” suggests that it’s only choice available to her.

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'DIE MY LOVE'

3 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for sexual content, graphic nudity, language, and some violent content)

Running time: 1:58

How to watch: In theaters Nov. 7

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