[Review] She Dies Tomorrow is About the Existential Dread of Living

You just moved in. Your boxes are strung everywhere. The wallpaper in the one room is half-finished, only sort of covering up the baby-ish, bluish paint the previous owners left. You survey your newly purchased domain. Drop your keys on the kitchen counter. Maybe get a glass of water because it’s been a day.

“It’s the best thing you could have done,” your best friend tells you.

But you can’t hold back the tears as you realize just how much time you’ve wasted because you have this unbearable thought lingering at the forefront of your consciousness. You tell that friend that you’re not okay and she suggests maybe watching a movie. But a movie’s an hour and a half and time is ticking. And as your friend prattles on about a party she doesn’t want to go to, you watch the sun set for the final time, hit by the realization that this is, in fact, the final time you’ll see it. 

Because you are going to die tomorrow.

The “you,” in this case, is Amy (Kate Lyn Sheil). And while she has dealt with bouts of depression and is a recovering alcoholic, there’s nothing technically wrong with her right now. She’s not sick. She hasn’t done anything life-threatening. There’s nothing suggesting that she’s going to die tomorrow, except the inalienable and existential truth that she is, in fact, going to die. Writer/Director Amy Seimetz sure paints a disturbing picture in these opening frames of She Dies Tomorrow as Amy rubs against her walls, digs through the dirt outside and touches the leaves. Her fingers almost erotically drag across the wooden floor; desperate for a feeling that life might exist after death. 

But the touching leads to an even more disturbing self-realization. Really, is there anything more disconcerting than watching a person blast “Lacrimosa” on repeat while scouring the internet for her own future crematory urn. How about while she’s simultaneously exploring leather jackets? 

Her previously prattling friend Jane (Jane Adams) comes over and discovers the sure signs of depression. Amy’s fallen off the wagon and empty bottles of wine and beer are strewn across the room. Amy, meanwhile, is outside drunkenly and dreamily leaf blowing in her garden. This is where the mysterious leather jacket searches become something more macabre:

“I was thinking...I could be made into a leather jacket?” she randomly tells Jane. “I want to be useful in death.” 

And after an argument about whether Amy is, in fact, going to die tomorrow, Jane leaves, unable to deal with Amy’s depressive drunkenness. But as Jane goes home and begins to look at flowers through a microscopic camera to capture the microcosms within the beauty of a simple flower, she’s hit by a thought. 

She, too, is going to die tomorrow. 

She Dies Tomorrow is the sophomore feature from Amy Seimetz and it is a doozy of experimental cinema and existential dread. It defies typical narrative progression, instead flitting from character to character as whatever ennui this maybe-virus is grips them. Once we’ve left Amy, we follow Jane as her desperation for spending her final day with someone leads her to her brother Jason (Chris Messina)’s home. There, she’s tormented by her sister-in-law Susan (Katie Aselton) who just wants to celebrate her birthday by discussing dolphin fucking and the depressive Jane is just crushing her vibe, god dammit. Before you know it, the ennui spreads from a “What if Jane’s right?” to “We’re all going to die at some point” to “I could die tomorrow” to the finality of “I am going to die tomorrow.”

It’s an existential dread that feels incredibly pertinent while we’re six+ months into a national quarantine. While this pandemic adds an additional level to it, She Dies Tomorrow deals in that inescapable miasma and ennui of a culture experiencing a 24 hour news programs telling its viewers that this is real and you should be afraid.

If you say and believe something long and loud enough, will it make it true? Does that wiggling conspiracy of doubt expressed so utterly omnipresently make it real? 

As both Amys take our hands and lead us through desolate wastelands, past, brief romances and life experiences we see the joys, the pains and the frustrations of a life unfulfilled. And what once had an churning tension becomes as numbing as the image of another victim named Sky (Michelle Rodriquez) lazily running her fingers through pool water while someone bleeds out nearby. It’s a shared experience. An ennui that brings the characters together into some existential crisis that is at once terrifying and numbing:

“Hi I’m Jane. I’m dying.”
“Hi, I’m Sky. I’m dying.”
”Hi, I’m Erin. I’m dying, too.”

It’s a unifying presence, however dreadful and life-threatening.

She Dies Tomorrow is an exciting sophomore feature for a director on the rise. It takes chances and is as comfortable being divisive as the central conceit is. As assured as the characters professing the inalienable knowledge of the incoming death. As bizarrely dark as a woman wanting to be turned into a leather jacket.

Less a traditional narrative and more about evocative feelings of depression. It’s a mood piece that, if you let it, will get under your skin just as easily as the fictional virus does. Much in the same way Starfish left me with a visual representation of depression, She Dies Tomorrow allows its characters to sit at the potential end of their lives and express conflicting thoughts: “It’s okay. It’s okay. I’m okay. I’m not okay.” It doesn’t offer easy answers and it lives in the same equivocal ambiguity the characters feel. It’s a brave piece of evocative fiction and hearkens a unique voice in genre filmmaking.