Mark Reviews Movies: SHE DIES TOMORROW

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 30, 2020

Like a song that keeps playing over and over in the mind, there's a thought that cannot escape or be exorcised from the minds of the characters in She Dies Tomorrow. It's one we all know but try to avoid. It's the one we keep at bay with other thoughts, daily and routine activities, humor, and straight-up denial. It's that cruelest of evolutionary developments. The thought is simple but terrifying: We are going to die.

Writer/director Amy Seimetz's sophomore feature, a nightmare of dread and anxiety, tackles that idea directly—not the fact of death, but the knowledge of the fact of death. It is, like so many challenging films, one that's difficult to categorize, because Seimetz's vision and ambition is so boldly uncomplicated.

If one had to describe it in more straightforward terms, this is a horror story, but there's no masked killer or supernatural being or previously unknown creature terrorizing these characters. There's not even an explanation for how this contagious idea—that death is, not only inevitable, but also imminent—started or why it is spreading. It began, though, and it is spreading.

The fact of it is as plain as the facts that we're going to die and that, for all we do to evade the knowledge, we all know it to be true. The terror here is an idea—a universal one. The horror is existential—cutting right to the core of our existence and the end of it.

The film, which follows a handful of characters as they attempt and fail to cope with the knowledge of their death and the assured belief that it will arrive within 24 hours, is a memento mori for the modern age. Surely, Seimetz's screenplay is broad enough that this tale could be looked at through a metaphorical or allegorical lens. There are issues of mental health—from substance abuse to anxiety and depression. There is the constant observation that everyday life, whether it be small talk about some trivial fact someone read online or the ways in which we separate ourselves from our real feelings and genuine connections with other people, has become hollow.

There is always something to chase—a new house for one character, an artistic endeavor for another, maintaining a relationship because it's expected for two more. The chase, though, is just part of the denial, and when presented with the knowledge of looming death, all of these things either stop mattering or become the only things that matter.

For all of the visual and narrative trickery, as well as the elliptical editing, on display here, Seimitz presents a lot of these characters and relationships with a sense of realism. It's heightened, of course, because of the circumstances, but we start to see recognizable behaviors and patterns thereof in these characters. In other words, we start to ask—and rarely stop asking—a single question: How would I react—in this situation, with this knowledge, with such certainty—in my own life? Seimetz's storytelling approach, filled with intentional and lengthy pauses, forces us to ask that and many more questions.

As for the specific story, it primarily follows Amy (Kate Lyn Sheil), an ordinary woman who just bought a house. She returns to it, after spending some time at a rental home in the desert with a short-term boyfriend, and does, well, not much of anything. A room being wallpapered goes uncompleted. There are boxes to unpack, but she tosses and kicks them when they're in the way of her lounging. The booze pours, and Amy repeatedly plays a portion of Mozart's well-known requiem on a record player.

She looks online for urns and then for clothes. When her friend Jane (Jane Adams) arrives to check on her, Amy insists that, when she dies, she wants to be turned into a jacket. Then, Amy tells Jane what she knows beyond all else to be true: She is going to die tomorrow.

Sitting in her basement, working on art involving photographs of microscopic cells, Jane has a similar revelation: She, too, is going to die tomorrow. Not wanting to be alone, she goes to the home of her brother Jason (Chris Messina) and his wife Susan (Katie Aselton), who's celebrating her birthday with friends Brian (Tunde Adebimple) and Tilly (Jennifer Kim), who are dating.

There, Jane drops the same bombshell to them. All of them, in turn, slowly realize the same certainty: They are going to die tomorrow.

The rest of the story moves back and forth between these characters, as well as back and forth in time with Amy, who recalls her weekend getaway with Craig (Kentucker Audley)—the man who, apparently, passed on this contagious idea to her, after he received it from a pizza delivery guy. That's as far back as any explanation goes, because it's all that matters.

Amy wants to check on Craig, to see if his belief turned out to be accurate (Seimetz is smart to keep the end result vague—showing the only death to be a possible self-fulfilling prophecy and another severe injury to be the consequence of other people believing the originator of the belief has killed them—because it's the idea, not the outcome, that matters). Jason and Susan worry for their daughter, whose wails of agony spread from her bedroom, and become more quietly connected, regretting some little things but not the big ones.

Brian and Tilly, whose relationship was nothing but an empty shell ready to end at this point, ironically spend their remaining time together, because there is no one else to fill the void of a partner in death. Jane has a very specific feeling about her demise, which she shares with a doctor (played by Josh Lucas), who also becomes infected and wants a kind of maternal comfort from his patient.

There isn't much to this story, but there doesn't need to be, either. The impact of the film is how it directly—with confidently unhurried rhythm, with a distinct visual style—addresses that deepest, most primal source of fear. She Dies Tomorrow wants us to be uncomfortable and unsettled, and Seimetz undeniably achieves that goal.

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