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Cannes 2025: Highest 2 Lowest, Die My Love, The Love That Remains
Denzel Washington (right) in Highest 2 Lowest Spike Lee’s maligned 2013 update of Park Chan-wook’s 2003 revenge picture, Oldboy, did little to inspire confidence in his latest reimagining of an Asian classic, this time relocating Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963) to DUMBO in Brooklyn. Given a very Spike title of Highest 2 Lowest, the Denzel Washington vehicle is expectedly brimming with the director’s signature expressive filmmaking—wildly cubist jump cut coverage within establishing shots, double-take character greetings and spontaneous shifts into saturated 16mm footage of New York abound—and tends to feel more like another excuse to create a cinematic love letter to his hometown and the Black artists and pop legends who inspire his craft. Lee replaces the shoemaking business that made Kurosawa’s protagonist Kingo Gondo wealthy with a milieu centered around the music industry.
Washington portrays David King, a producer who co-founded the iconic record label Stackin’ Hits in the early 2000s, which he’s being pressured to sell to a company pushing AI-generated music. While the villain of this movie is certainly the man asking King for 17.5 million Swiss franc ransom to save the life of his friend Paul’s (Jeffrey Wright) teenage son, I’ll admit to being taken aback that this movie, which was produced and will be distributed by Apple, effectively vilifies AI production despite participating in its infiltration of the streaming market. After King speaks to the kidnapper on the phone and notices that the voice matches that of a rapper whose music he recently heard, he stops investigators from cross-checking the vocals through an AI interpreter. King, of course, doesn’t need AI; his trained ear can tell it’s the same person, and that’s good enough to pursue that lead.
As is often the case in Lee’s recent work, the movie’s messiness is both its charm and its encumbrance. For a film about music, it contains an awful lot of terrible orchestral music—composed not by Lee’s regular collaborator Terence Blanchard, but rather by Howard Drossin, whose sole noteworthy credit is Spike Lee & Danya Taymor’s instantly forgotten 2018 feature Pass Over—which sounds like a stock score written by, well, AI. Acting, especially from Ilfenesh Haderais, who plays King’s wife Pam, is hammed up and missing the intensity I’ve come to expect in Lee’s work—more than one of my peers have likened its dramatic stylings to the aesthetics of BET original content, a connection I admittedly lack the exposure to draw myself—and its class commentary is more blunt than I thought possible. All of the film’s deficiencies are magnified by an invigorating late scene in which King confronts rapper Yung Felon (A$AP Rocky) in a recording studio, delivering an almost tragic stand-off between the two that’s worthy of the Shakespearean tone hinted at in the film’s opening act, wherein we received another of the film’s oddly pejorative product placements: “Turn off that phone or I will strike thee down with a vengeance.” Lee’s movies are nothing if not unafraid of incoherence and self-contradiction, and it’s why I still love him.
Messiness is likewise a feature of Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love, and I sympathize with the filmmaker’s frustration over what I’ve also felt has been a common misreading of her film on the ground in Cannes, with many calling her movie a portrait of postpartum depression (PPD). While Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) is indeed accused of exhibiting PPD symptoms by characters in the film (which is adapted from Argentine writer Ariana Harwicz’s 2017 book of the same name), I found her pathology—marked by ferocious mood swings, violent eruptions of rage and a toxic (and often quite funny) sarcasm—to be more dynamic and mysterious, and not nearly as prescriptive as others have claimed. Ramsay’s depiction of Grace’s feral character is, as her work has often been, at least as interested in atmosphere and tone as it is in psychology, and here seems intent on evoking a sense of going mad. The camera sways and roves over the Calgary prairies where it was filmed (standing in for Montana), the pastoral setting constantly getting corrupted by editor Toni Froschhammer’s abrasive cuts to nightmarish visions of Tarkovskian flaming forests and errant stallions, a domestic hellscape made worse by the arrival of an aggressively yappy dog that precludes a moment’s peace of mind.
Grace is a writer who doesn’t write, her relationship with her boyfriend, Jackson (Robert Pattinson), is as emotionally and physically abusive as it is fickle (i.e. very), and a lot of the tension of watching the movie comes from the sense that if it weren’t directed by a woman it would absolutely be lambasted as a misogynistic piece of shit. Arriving well into a moment during which film and culture industries strive to share empowering journeys of womanhood, I found it something of a balm to behold a representation of femininity that is so open to ugliness (or maybe I just miss Lars von Trier). It’s very much a movie about the responsibilities and burdens foisted upon women specifically, but I also think that, more than the trials of motherhood, it’s concerned with the experience of falling out of love with the way one lives and creates happiness for oneself, and the fury that is generated when a person is forced into incompatibility. The movie overflows with bitterness and stupidity as this couple spits fire at one another and I don’t see anything wrong with that, especially when it’s as funny as this often is.
By contrast, a broken household is depicted with utmost affection and playfulness in Icelandic filmmaker Hlynur Pálmason’s The Love That Remains, which was placed in the festival’s ill-defined Cannes Première section. In this film a visual artist named Anna (Saga Garðarsdóttir) lives with her three children, makes art (which is actually kind of good!) and has melancholic interactions with her ex-husband, Maggi (Sverrir Gudnason), a fishing trawler longing to reintegrate into the family’s everyday life. As with Pálmason’s previous films Godland (2022) and, in particular, A White, White Day (2019), the narrative happenings are secondary to the director’s interest in manufacturing rich, impressionistic tapestries of people in places, constructed entirely from banal actions and small miracles of movement. Details like Anna and Maggi building a fence to keep horses from trampling her artwork—large strips of white canvas marked red by rust, created by placing shaped metal scraps atop the material before it’s left out and subjected to the elements for days if not weeks—or watching the children pick blueberries from their garden before juicing them (and making a huge mess in the process) are just a couple of strangely delightful segments composing this film’s larger collage, which modestly argues for a way of life that can resourcefully exist and collaborate with an environment. Complete with fantastical flourishes, monstrous chickens and a ghoulish villain that arrives in the form of a clueless art dealer, it’s a film that never stopped surprising me—with the exception of the film’s lovely sequence showing the changing seasons passing over a scarecrow made out of knight armor, a time-lapse strategy that the director has now inserted into all of his films. Mixed as the results have been (again, he needs better narratives, or better yet to ditch them entirely), I still have no reason to doubt that Pálmason will go down as one of his generation’s purest filmmakers.
