“Babies are hard. I don’t think people talk about that enough,” a well-meaning woman at a party tells Grace ( Jennifer Lawrence ), a new mother seemingly afflicted by postnatal depression. Grace gives her a withering look. “It’s all anybody talks about,” she retorts.

In this strange, angry film, people are indeed constantly talking about how difficult motherhood is. “Everybody goes a little loopy that first year,” smiles Pam, Grace’s mother-in-law. But all this talking makes no difference to Grace, a flailing writer, whose descent into what we might reductively call psychosis (more on that later), is played with overwhelming weariness by Lawrence.

Grace and her husband Jackson ( Robert Pattinson ) have just moved to an isolated farmhouse in Montana, which used to belong to Jackson’

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