Film Review: She Dies Tomorrow

Film

Jul 27

Inadvertently topical and deliberately powerful, She Dies Tomorrow is one of the year’s best filmS

Originally slated to debut at SXSW in March before the festival was canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic, She Dies Tomorrow is finally seeing its U.S. release July 31st at select drive-ins and August 6th on VOD. Writer and director Amy Seimetz, with her third feature film, conjures a gorgeous and affecting nightmare with a weight of timeliness that can’t be ignored. Experimental, surreal, and mesmerizing, She Dies Tomorrow is one of the best films of the year.

More than just simple allegory for these trying times, Amy Seimetz’s She Dies Tomorrow is the perfect encapsulation of an entire zeitgeist - a cinematic representation of uncertainty in the face of a single surety: that something bad is going to happen. A gripping fever dream of a narrative, the film taps so much into the emotional core of the fractured public consciousness and the current global panic that it might as well have been crafted yesterday. But that’s not to say it doesn’t stand on its own two feet - far from it. With a protagonist also named Amy (frequent Seimetz collaborator Kate Lyn Sheil), She Dies Tomorrow paints a deeply personal portraiture of existential dread and fear of death, two virtually universal experiences that extend well beyond the relevancy of COVID-19 and the isolation of quarantine; anyone who has ever struggled with anxiety, depression, loneliness, or negative ideation will be able to grasp the profundity of the film.

Amy is unwell. When we’re first introduced to her, her behavior is riddled with an ennui that should be familiar to many of us that have been cooped up for months: doomscrolling through an endless parade of apocalyptic news, leaving unpacked moving boxes everywhere, and blasting Mozart’s Requiem in her bare-bones apartment. But peppered within her listless routine is also the inexplicable; we see Amy caressing the furniture and hardwood floors as if she’s exploring her senses for first (or last) time, plunging her hands into the soil outside, and shopping for cremation urns online. It isn’t until she speaks to her friend Jane (Jane Adams) that we find out the extent of how not okay she is; Amy is seized by the notion that she is going to die, and that the final grains of sand in her hourglass are due to slip the mortal coil no later than tomorrow. With the presence of alcohol (Amy’s not supposed to be drinking) in combination with her disconcerting behavior, Jane quickly chalks Amy’s premonition up to a relapse. But, then, something peculiar happens: Within hours of leaving Amy’s home, Jane starts to feel it, too - an unshakable sense of impending doom that will claim her own life within 24 hours.

“A gripping fever dream of a narrative, the film taps so much into the emotional core of the fractured public consciousness and the current global panic that it might as well have been crafted yesterday.”

She Dies Tomorrow has one of the shortest plot synopses in recent memory: “Amy thinks she’s dying tomorrow…and it’s contagious.” Those eight words are simple and economical, but from this barest of descriptions, Seimetz is able to spin a rich and powerful tapestry of the human condition and how we confront (or dismiss) our darkest thoughts. As Jane is gripped by the same deadly prophecy as Amy, it becomes clear that this is a pandemic of the psychological order, jumping from person to person, mind to mind. And her story is the one that spills into the community at large; leaving Amy to her own solitary devices, Jane’s contracted dread spreads to her brother Jason (Chris Messina), her sister-in-law Susan (Katie Aselton), and their friends (Tunde Adebimpe and Jennifer Kim), all of whom initially dismiss Jane, and all of whom eventually succumb to the same sinister mind-worm. It’s here that She Dies Tomorrow shines brightest: Part Cassandra myth, part allegory, part introspection, it all works seamlessly as a cohesive whole with the weight of Armageddon. It’s fascinating to see Seimetz’s characters all grapple with their own personal epiphanies: some detonate their long-simmering relationships, some turn to violence, while others reflect inward.

The acting in She Dies Tomorrow is routinely excellent, but Kate Lyn Sheil’s performance is the one that rises above. As Amy, Sheil’s embodiment of her oft-silent fugue is as mesmerizing as it is affecting. While the rest of the cast is great at conveying the progression of this viral fear and their varying responses to it, it’s Sheil’s portrayal that most fully explores existential crisis; utilizing her body language and indecipherable face to deliver a bevy of emotions (or lack of thereof), Amy’s divergent narrative is more akin to performance art rather than a traditional screen performance, and it’s absolutely captivating.

While there are tinges of horror within She Dies Tomorrow - mostly from its morbid subject matter and visual flourishes - the film succeeds more as character study and surreal art. Director of photography Jay Keitel paints with many palettes that resemble what we’ve seen in horror recently, utilizing darkly colorful strobes and unwavering closeups, but Seimetz crafts a narrative that feels like it’s on a whole different plane of existence, diving headfirst into the nature of anxiety, loneliness, and mortality in the wake of a psychic ripple. At one point in the film, someone describes the feeling: “It’s like when you’re in New York City in the summer, when you look up and there’s air conditioners everywhere, and you just know, one of those is going to pop out and crash down on your head.” With She Dies Tomorrow, Amy Seimetz has distilled that irrational fear - and the fear that we’ve all been feeling these past six months of 2020 - into a sublime arthouse film, and one that I’m unlikely to forget anytime soon.