Film reviews: Die, My Love | Dragonfly | Anemone | The Choral | Predator: Badlands

Die, My Love (15) ★★★★

Dragonfly (15) ★★★★

Anemone (15) ★★

The Choral (12A) ★★

Predator: Badlands (12A) ★★

Die, My Love sees Lynne Ramsay return with a wild, darkly funny, gothic-tinged drama about marriage and motherhood that comes on like a punk rock tribute to amour fou, but mutates into a stranger, more abstract, more sensuous portrait of a woman reckoning with the literal and figurative isolation that comes with parenting a newborn.

It stars Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson as Grace and Jackson, youngish lovers who relocate from New York to the countryside, ostensibly to be near Jackson’s ailing father (Nick Nolte) and his mother Pam (Sissy Spacek), but possibly to fulfil some idyllic rural fantasy of Jackson's, who revels in the freedom their new house seems to offer, even though he’s inherited it from an uncle whose gruesome end tells a very different story about the potential bliss on offer.

Grace, on the other hand, senses what’s in store right away, doubling over like a puppet whose strings have been cut and proceeding to mount a feral, full-frontal assault on the vicissitudes of parenthood when she’s left holding the baby while Jackson disappears for days at a time for work and carnal trysts with truck-stop waitresses.

Lawrence goes all-out here with a turned-up-to-eleven performance of raging, riotous defiance. Though it’s a performance rooted in the mental health realities of motherhood — postpartum depression is referenced directly and indirectly several times — it would be a mistake to take everything too literally; Ramsay retains an element of ambiguity about what’s real and what’s not to better encapsulate the interior life of a woman horrified by the prospect of being expected to sublimate herself to societal conventions just because she’s had a kid.

It’s a fearless performance in this way, and a fearless film, bolstered by audacious images, jet black humour and impeccable soundtrack cuts.

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Great performances are also on offer in Dragonfly, the unsettling new drama from London to Brighton director Paul Andrew Williams about a tentative friendship that blossoms between a lonely pensioner and her guarded next-door neighbour after a fall leaves the former reliant on carers.

Respectively played by Brenda Bleythn and Andrea Riseborough, each actor (past Oscar nominees both) brings the full force of her talents to bear on the film — Bleythn embodying the indignity of ageing with unflinching candour as her character, Elsie, endures a series of on-the-clock carers who don’t always know her name, and Riseborough infusing the hostile-on-the-surface Colleen (whose only companion is a huge mixed breed dog called Sabre) with an empathy denied her by the world at large.

As their reliance on each other grows following Colleen’s offer to look after Elsie, so too does the air of unease, with Williams playing on societal prejudice to subtly ratchet up the tension as Elsie’s mistrustful, but mostly absent, son John (Jason Watkins) takes against Colleen’s shrewdness and off-kilter energy. Mixing social realism with the enveloping dread of a finely-wrought psychological thriller, it’s a powerful film, unnerving and heartbreaking in equal measure.

READ MORE: Frankenstein review: Guillermo del Toro's gory and goofy Edinburgh-set tale rarely sparks into life

Co-written by Daniel Day-Lewis and his son Ronan Day-Lewis, and marking the directorial debut of the latter, Anemone is a self-indulgent slog that exploits the caché of the three-time Oscar winner’s return to acting to little real effect.

Day-Lewis stars as Ray, a former British soldier who’s long-since abandoned his child (played by Samuel Bottomley) to live a life of self-imposed exile in the woods as penance for an atrocity committed while on active service during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. With Ray’s soldier-son now AWOL, though, Ray’s estranged brother Jem (Sean Bean) heads into the wilderness to persuade him to come home and deal with his past.

What follows is a series of stagey exchanges in which Day-Lewis Snr lets rip with the acting fireworks while Day-Lewis Jr attempts to juice-up the film’s slim premise with contrived music-video flourishes and an ending ripped off from Magnolia.

There’s yet more stagey drama in The Choral, a stifling slice of First World War-era heritage cinema starring Ralph Fiennes as a closeted choir master enlisted to help a Yorkshire choral society stage their annual show as the men of the town are called up to fight. Directed by National Theatre veteran Nicholas Hytner, from a script by Alan Bennett, the film fails to stir up much emotion, overstuffed as it is with too many thinly sketched characters.

The jokey, touchy-feely, kid-friendly Predator movie no-one was asking for arrives in the form of Predator: Badlands. Made by the same team that did the direct-to-streaming Predator prequel Prey, the new film reconfigures the mythology by zeroing in on a Predator who’s the weakest in his clan as he sets out to prove his worth. In homage to the terrible Alien vs Predator movies, it also further strip-mines Alien and Aliens by teaming him up with a partially destroyed synthetic human (Elle Fanning), although, as written, this character owes much more to Star Wars irritants Jar Jar Binks and C-3PO.

All films are in cinemas from 7 November.

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