No Soft Edges: Watching Die My Love

Cinema is a communal experience. A film never lands the same way twice: it ricochets through our personal archives, activating a custom-made network of memories, conversations, books, people who have passed through us. In this spirit, Glamcult hosted a panel talk following the screening of Die My Love, marking the film’s release on everyone’s favourite streaming platform, MUBI Nederland. Joining us for the evening — alongside an impressive cake reconstruction (if you know the scene, you know) — were Shaquille Shaniqua Joy, Ashgan El-Hamus, and Savannah Wolin, to dissect the film’s portrayal of female emotional intensity, motherhood, power dynamics, and their reverberations far beyond the cinema room. The premise is simple on the surface: the film follows Grace as she navigates new motherhood in rural isolation with her partner. And while being tucked away in the middle of nowhere with Robert Pattinson and Jennifer Lawrence might sound like a pastoral fantasy come alive, Die My Love quickly takes the candy away, exposing how isolation can sharpen desire, despair, and everything in between. 

Ashgan is a screenwriter and director whose work renders seemingly small human dramas with a grand emotional scale. Her short film BIRDLAND, which explores the complexities of a mother-daughter relationship, won the Grand Prix de la Ville Brest at the Brest Film Festival — a testament to her perceptive eye and emotional precision. Savannah Wolin is a director, writer, and public speaker whose work centres on nuanced, underrepresented narratives. Drawing on her academic background in sociology, she examines how intimate emotional experiences are shaped by broader social and systemic forces. The conversation was moderated by Shaquille Shaniqua Joy, a moderator and cultural curator focusing on storytelling through embodied experience, conversations, programs, and exhibitions.

Together, they opened up a layered discussion on female subjectivity, mental health beyond diagnosis, and the way personal unraveling is often inseparable from the structural pressures placed on women. For those who have seen the film, this is an invitation to revisit it through a sharper lens — like a less insufferable, more substantiated Letterboxd review unravelling in real-time. For those who haven’t – we have you weekend plans locked in. Consider this your preview, as you log onto MUBI to watch this gem.

The conversation began with an acknowledgement that Die My Love offers no easy answers. We are not given a neat psychological explanation for Grace’s descent; we are simply positioned as bystanders, watching her slip, resist, and unravel. Ashgan noted how disruptive this feels precisely because of what we’re used to: we routinely watch men behave terribly on screen — cheat, abandon, self-destruct — without demanding a backstory or justification. When women act in similarly ‘ugly’ ways, however, we instinctively search for reasons. A diagnosis, a trauma, a cause. This reflex, she pointed out, “mirrors a cycle in real life, where women are constantly pressured to overexplain themselves.”

Savannah built on this by reframing explanation itself as a power mechanism. Having to justify your choices, emotions, or desires is rarely neutral — it’s a demand made by those in positions of authority. In that sense, the film’s refusal to explain Grace becomes a subtle inversion of power. “It was actually very nice to feel with the main character and try to experience that emotional state with her,” Savannah notes. Instead of analysing, we’re encouraged to feel alongside her. Understanding, then, doesn’t emerge from logic or apology, but from sustained attention and empathy.

This tension sharpens when the conversation turns to motherhood. Motherhood is expected to soften women — to smooth out their edges, make them more patient, more selfless, more palatable. What Die My Love presents instead is sharpness: irritability, rage, erotic charge, boredom. Added to this is the discomfort of watching Grace’s personhood slowly disappear. Shaquille invited the room to sit with what it truly means to be a woman and a mother under capitalist, patriarchal, and white supremacist systems. What kinds of selves are permitted to exist? Which ones are rendered invisible? And how might we move through our own lives reclaiming not only our own personhood, but the personhood of mothers as well — an invisibility that echoes across marginalised identities.

Ashgan spoke candidly about her own resistance to the film: “At some point, I didn’t want to watch it. And I think that’s very powerful, because then you start to get questions instead of answers, which is good.” Discomfort, here, becomes productive — a sign that spectatorship has shifted from passive consumption to active reckoning. Savannah extended this reading, pointing to Grace’s self-harm (shockingly depicted, by the way) as one of the most difficult moments to sit with: “For me, the most uncomfortable part was also her hurting herself, also because I saw it within the framework of her trying to get agency and a sense of control about her life.” This unease is further complicated by the film’s racial dynamics, particularly the relationship between a white woman and a Black man — “one we have encountered earlier in historical accounts,” as Savannah noted — carrying an ingrained weight and violence that cannot be separated from how these scenes are read or felt.

Desire and intersectionality became another key thread. Grace is, quite simply, horny — and the film refuses to sanitise or moralise that fact. “The poet Audre Lorde speaks about the erotic really being one of the most true feelings and experiences and sensations a person,” Savannah brings up. “But women often fall into that dichotomy, especially in this case, of being a caregiver or being a person who can actually experience sexuality.” Drawing on the classic Madonna/Whore complex, Savannah notes how women are often cut off from this sexual force through rigid social roles, even to this day. When desire is directed toward a Black body, the question becomes even more fraught, entangled with histories of fetishisation and racialised violence. The film doesn’t resolve these tensions — it exposes them, leaving the audience to grapple with their own position within them.

This led to a broader reflection on accessibility and responsibility in art-making and spectatorship. What does it mean to create work that is emotionally and politically complex without turning understanding into a marker of superiority? How do we engage with art without slipping into a kind of enlightened distance — the comfort of ‘getting it’ rather than letting it unsettle us? The panel suggested that accessibility is not about simplifying narratives, but about remaining open: asking what the work was made for, what we grasp immediately, what resists us, and how we carry those insights into conversation with others.

Questions of violence and perception followed naturally. Several moments in the film are undeniably brutal, yet what registers as violence can shift, as Shaquille recounts, “depending on the generation that you’re in, the body that you’re in, what you have been taught is violent and what isn’t.” Being confronted with a film you cannot easily escape — two hours in a dark room, phones away, exits politely ignored. What does the discomfort stir up? What does it mirror back to you?

In the final moments of the panel, an audience member offered a different interpretation (yes! that’s why we love cinema). For them, the plot wasn’t that big of a spit in the face to the patriarchy. They saw Grace’s husband as a failing patriarch, and her unraveling little more than boredom in the face of his absence. As Ashgan and Savannah pointed out, perhaps this multiplicity is the film’s quiet thesis: patriarchal structures fail everyone. Men and women alike are left alienated, disconnected, stuck in roles that offer no real sustenance. It’s something we all recognise, while the roadmap to this conclusion looks different for each individual depending on how we let the film pass through us. And perhaps, the beauty of cinema lies in teaching us how to ask sharper questions — about desire, power, care, and the kinds of lives we actually want to live.

So, head to MUBI Nederland, watch Die My Love, and let us know what precipice it leaves on your mind.