Die My Love features a full-throttle performance from the Oscar-winning actress as a young mother having a mental breakdown. It's an extraordinary depiction of the challenges women can face.

In subversive Scottish film-maker Lynne Ramsay's latest film Die My Love, Grace and Jackson are a young, seemingly loved-up couple who move from New York to the Midwest to take on a giant fixer-upper of a country house. At the start, they dance, they have sex, they talk about the writing Grace (a firecracker Jennifer Lawrence) will do and the music Jackson (Robert Pattinson) will make. And then, in an abrupt cut forward by six months, we see that they have made a baby boy instead.

A couple moving to an isolated house in the country, only for things to unravel in strange and terrifying ways, sounds like the premise of a horror movie. But Die My Love is only a horror movie in theory: it's actually a domestic drama about a young mother who is slowly having a mental breakdown, aided and abetted by a clueless, philandering husband, a steep drop-off in sex, and crushing writer's block which has left her glassy-eyed and sunken into herself.

But this isn't a solemn tale of a woman with fraying nerves; it's vivid, alive, sexy, and funny at times. Grace waves her bottom in her boyfriend's face as they fight; he buys her the world's most annoying dog. "With mental health films – people expect them to have this serious tone," Lynne Ramsay tells the BBC. "I think there are other things in this film. You wonder if Grace is more free than any other character in the end. Jennifer's a natural comedian, you know. So it brought this lightness to it that I loved – the character of Grace is really fierce and unapologetic."

Zipping around the house in a state of manic boredom and misery, with one hand down the front of her shorts half the time, Lawrence is a ball of animalistic energy, unwashed and uninterested in politeness or feminine expectation. It's a remarkable, unselfconscious performance from the Oscar-winning actress. Based on Ariana Harwicz's slim, harrowing 2012 novel of the same name, Ramsay's film is a departure from the source material in several major ways, but her thesis of a specifically female kind of mental breakdown – one which feels brewed in the cauldron of social expectation, male obliviousness, and toxic heterosexual relationships – is the same. Miranda Christophers, a psychosexual and relationship therapist, tells the BBC: "It's important that there's mental health support for women after they've had children, especially. At specific points in a female's life, there's a need for more support in a way that might differ to men – around pregnancy, postnatally, or around menopause. There's a need for more tailored support." This is not, unfortunately, support that Grace receives.

Grace struggles with her formless countryside days at home while Jackson is away for work – she grows abrasive and erratic, masturbating constantly, keeping her baby awake at strange hours, living in squalor and thrumming, insistent rage. She eventually graduates to vicious fights with Jackson and to actual self-harm.

"You're not always sympathising with her, but you're with her," Ramsay says of her whirlwind protagonist. "She's insufferable, but he still loves her. And she doesn't feel sorry for herself. She's a beast. She's a punk. There were elements of that character in the book where instead of being apologetic, she's like a fierce wild animal."

Throughout the film, people around Grace keep offering her advice and opinions ("Babies are hard", or "If you get a screamer…"), to her total disdain. Even her kindly, well-intentioned mother-in-law, played by Sissy Spacek ("We all go a little loopy in the first year") cannot force this square peg to fit back into a round hole.........

© BBC