She Dies Tomorrow | Amy Seimetz | August 7, 2020
Things aren’t so great in the world right now, with a constant fear of a virus that could be literally anywhere we go. This makes actor/director Amy Seimetz’s new film She Dies Tomorrow eerily timely. When we meet Amy (Kate Lyn Sheil), she thinks that her time is up and that she is going to die tomorrow. When her friend Jane (Jane Adams) comes to visit, Amy doesn’t give many details about what she thinks will happen to her, just that tomorrow will be the end for her.
When Jane goes home to work, she begins to suddenly get the same dread-induced feeling that she too is about to die. At a party, she tells this to her brother Jason (Chris Messina) and her sister in law Susan (Katie Aselton), and it doesn’t take long before they (as well as party guests played by TV On The Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe and Jennifer Kim) also find themselves consumed by some force that makes them think that their demise is imminent.
Seimetz delivers the story in a highly stylistic fashion that feels like its playing out in real-time. Its slow deliberate pace shows a confident director with restraint. While some may find this to be effective in giving She Dies Tomorrow an all-consuming feel, its slow-burn steady pace will be a challenge for some viewers.
The film couldn’t have been released at a better time, considering that we are all collectively sharing in the fear and anxiety/depression of a virus that we still don’t know that much about, at least enough where we aren’t afraid to go and live our lives normally. In that regard, Seimetz’s screenplay does capture this shared community of fear and dread in an interesting manner.
It’s just that this impressionistic feel and highly stylized fashion can only take your story so far. While the direction is smart, Jay Keitel’s cinematography is astonishing, and the Sheil and Adams’ performances are solid, She Dies Tomorrow left me wanting more. It’s more of one big moody experience than a cohesive fleshed out story, which is part of why I wasn’t able to immerse myself into it more. While Amy gets a lot of focus here, there really isn’t any main character or driving force to keep the plot moving forward.
There’s an interesting idea at play here and some unsettling elements that are borderline Lovecraftian horror. While part of its charm is that it feels like a unique idea, She Dies Tomorrow is just not one that is consistently balanced or fleshed out and feels like a few different ideas melded into one. There wasn’t a solid way to cross the finish line, leaving me feeling both impressed with the look and feel but also not connecting to it in any way more than surface level.
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