Die My Love is a film that made me angry. Perhaps it’s what director Lynne Ramsay wanted me to feel, a connection to the spiraling headspace of its protagonist, Grace (Jennifer Lawrence. She seems to be suffering from a bout of postpartum depression, a trendy topic among the motherhood subgenre that also includes recent films like Tully, A Mouthful of Air, and Baby Ruby. Die My Love would have you believe that postpartum depression involves walking around the house with a knife or a shotgun, having an uncontrollable urge to kill your annoying dog, and violently bashing your head through every pane of glass you come across. None of it seems to be grounded in reality, mostly a showcase for its lead star to cut loose and be praised with adjectives like “raw” and “fearless.” I’d prefer to label it as self-indulgent, overwrought, and just plain bad.

Ramsay drops her two leads in the middle of the Montana wilderness. Grace and her partner Jackson (Robert Pattinson) have inherited the farmhouse of his recently deceased uncle, a remote paradise for them to cut loose. And, boy, do they ever. Sex looks and sounds like two animals fighting, the pair writhing around on the floor, scratching and biting. Music is constantly blaring, the floorboards chip and squeak as they’re jumped on without a care in the world. What breaks up this hedonistic cycle is the introduction of a third wheel: their newborn son. Responsibility isn’t exactly a word they’re looking for at a time like this, which makes its forced placement drive a wedge between their relationship and Grace’s connection to reality. “I’m stuck between wanting to do something and not wanting to do anything,” is an explanation she blankly offers to a nosy party guest.

Ramsay isn’t a filmmaker interested in straightforward methods of communication. Words are often replaced by images, jarringly photographed by Seamus McGarvey and stitched together by Toni Froschhammer. Everyone is lost in their own little world, illustrated through ultra-shallow focus, the background a swirling blur. Everything feels jagged, with danger lurking in every piece of hellish soundscape and dingy production design. On their own, each of these facets is serviceable, albeit a bit disappointing considering the talent. Together, spearheaded by Ramsay’s vision, they’re incredibly off-putting and obvious. In attempting to capture the inexplicability of Grace’s state of mind, a bright, neon sign is brandished in the corner of every frame, perpetually telling us exactly what we’re supposed to feel.

That kind of shagginess leaves its star out high and dry. Lawrence’s performance is exactly that: a performance. She’s walking around all fours in the fields, licking windows, barking at the dog, and constantly complaining about not having sex with Jackson. It’s all so painfully “edgy,” seemingly stemming from a constant need to prove something, as if making faces and flailing around is what it means to be a “serious actor.” It beats me to assume what needs to be proved, as Lawrence has more than solidified her chops as a movie star and actor. Hell, she already played a stand-in mother married to a shitty man in a remote house in Mother!, a film that matched its madness with inquisitive substance.

While Lawrence gets plenty (too much) to do, the rest of the cast just kind of stand around and watch. Pattinson’s character is woefully underdeveloped and uninteresting, the prototypical movie husband who is unwilling to communicate when the going gets tough. Sissy Spacek plays his mother, Pam, who is also dealing with a sudden change after the death of her husband Harry (Nick Nolte). The veteran acting pair are the lighthouses in this densely fogged-up narrative, with the ship repeatedly crashing without ever reaching its destination. It’s best not to explain LaKeith Stanfield’s presence as a wordless seducer that certainly should have been fully excised from all aspects of the project.

This is the kind of arthouse film that gives the genre a bad wrap, a movie destined to receive an F CinemaScore and be another small catalyst in the rapid decline of risk-taking from the average moviegoer. If this is the kind of stuff that we’re risking our hard-earned dollars and time for, then what’s the point? The point is to be given an experience you’ll never forget, enlightened in ways that other art forms can’t quite achieve. Granted, that is true about Die My Love, just in the exact opposite ways everyone hoped for.