Jennifer Lawrence, Rose Byrne and the Rise of Mom Trauma Cinema

On a front porch in a decrepit Appalachian home, a new father and his infant son idle away the afternoon. The proud papa, Jackson ( Robert Pattinson ), beams while his child giggles at the sky. Neither seems particularly observant of Jackson’s wife, and the baby’s mother, is approaching on all fours—and in tall grass that Jackson never thinks to mow.

This is Grace ( Jennifer Lawrence ), the protagonist of Lynne Ramsay’s Die, My Love . She’s also a new mother who looks at her offspring in much the same way that a jungle cat considers a gazelle before going into a crouch. The visual metaphor is not subtle, yet little is intended to be in Ramsay’s stark meditation on the epic trials, tribulations, and even traumas of motherhood.

Marketed around the obvious sexiness of Pattinson and La