As Die My Love begins, Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson) are inspecting the house they’re about to move into. Their conversation is plain and familiar. It’s a realistic depiction of how this young couple would talk about this pending change, without regard for updating an audience and with the shared familiarity that makes it feel like they don’t need to rehash decisions already made. Director Lynne Ramsay shoots the scene from a distance, the interior of the house appearing as boxes within boxes. Soon, the film implies, Grace will be confined.

Ramsay’s new film, her first in eight years, is officially adapted from a 2012 novel by Ariana Harwicz. No matter its foundational source, it feels like a pure distillation of Ramsay’s dark, cynical, confrontational sensibility. The film is presented as a series of narrative fragments. Grace and Jackson move in and celebrate their time together with the freewheeling, small-scale recklessness of young love. Then, Grace gets pregnant and has a child. Seemingly all at once, everything changes. The verve vanishes from the marriage, and spends long, lonely days in the isolated house. She is perhaps suffering from postpartum depression, or maybe these are interior troubles that she’s always experienced. The situation is simply bringing them to the surface.

Again, Ramsay is less interested in shaping a narrative with familiar, easily recognizable beats. She instead wants to plunge the viewer into the torrent of discomfort and uncertainty that Grace feels. It is often difficult to pin down what is something that all the characters are experiencing and what is a manifestation of Grace’s unraveling mind. In the motorcyclist who rides by the house really there? Is he an invented projection that represents Grace’s desire to be rescued from her domestication? Is he somehow both at once? Ramsay isn’t interested in providing any answers. For her, unsettling questions are satisfying all on their own.

Ramsay’s approach can be a challenge. Die My Love sometimes threatens to be broiled to a crispy husk by its own abstractions. Lawrence keeps it tethered to emotions that are true. She refortifies her reputation as a uncommonly fearless actor, scraping away at the anger that simultaneous animates and smothers Grace. Though the sheer force of her acting, she makes the film into a exploration rather than an experiment. She is the pathfinder, helping everyone else involved in the project find their way. That observation isn’t meant to diminish Ramsay’s craft. Ramsay gives Lawrence the space to do this work and shapes seemingly raw, harsh takes into a compelling whole. Grace might detached from those who she relies on for emotional balance, but Lawrence and Ramsay are so solidly in sync that they together create a performance that is a cinematic astonishment.