Though writer-director Amy Seimetz’s new film, She Dies Tomorrow, was made well before COVID-19 changed everything, it feels uncannily suited to this moment. The title is not a metaphor, but a warning that the reason Amy (Kate Lyn Sheil) is dangerously depressed in the film’s opening minutes is that she somehow knows she’s going to die the next day. Lonely and unable to cope with the weight of that knowledge, she calls her friend Jane (Jane Adams), who reluctantly comes over to try to comfort her. However, when Jane soon experiences the same knowledge that she will die too, it becomes clear that Amy’s melancholy isn’t just depression.
Conceptually, the story is tailor-made to explore all the existential dread that the last few months–particularly in America–have created: the easy spread of contagion, inescapable death, crushing isolation, etc. Unfortunately, because viewers have been living with a literal version of this abstract idea for months, it’s possible She Dies Tomorrow comes off weaker than it should.
Without already knowing what the film is about (or at least assuming the title is a metaphor when going in), Amy’s drunken moping through her newly-purchased home seems like just depression. She reminisces about an old boyfriend, lovingly fondles plants in her yard and listens repeatedly to Mondo Boys’ “Requiem K 626 Lacrimosa (Reprise)” on her record player. She’s sad, lonely and her call to Jane is a cry for help, but it’s not until we see her searching for urns on the internet that it becomes entirely clear that her belief in her impending death is genuine. And if the film approached her reaction to that knowledge in a less artificial way, maybe the viewer would be more inclined to buy into the whole concept.
At the beginning, Seimetz is very committed to keeping a distance between the audience and the film. She and editor Kate Brokaw don’t tell the story of Amy’s malaise in a linear fashion, jumping back in forth in time without clearly indicating it and abruptly cutting to the next scene just as we’re getting a handle on what’s happening. Similarly, Jay Keitel’s cinematography is deliberately unsettling, often showing Amy and later Jane from afar or obscured by doorframes in ways that suggest the camera is about to move or to emphasize how little the viewer understands of what they’re seeing.
Most distancing of all, though, is Amy herself, both because of the way Sheil performers her and the way Seimetz writes her. Sheil, unfortunately, isn’t the most convincing performer. An early scene where Amy stares through a window and intermittently cries feels like watching an exercise in an acting class and there are many equally cringeworthy moments throughout. As Sheil plays her, Amy feels artificial and choices like the fact she has to literally restart the Mondo Boys record every time the song ends rather than maybe playing it off her phone or something equally pedestrian makes her feel like a hipster manic pixie dream girl cliché instead of a real person. Perhaps the character’s worst quirk, though, is her fixation with being made into a leather jacket after her death. It’s meant to be funny, one assumes, but the selfishness of that idea, of becoming something pretty and useful rather than being just plain useful and donating her organs speaks to the character’s selfishness. Unfortunately, selfishness, or perhaps more acutely, self-centeredness defines all of the characters.
Though the film fares much better once it switches perspective to Jane (in part because Adams is a more nuanced actor) her self-absorption is also really maddening. Jane doesn’t know initially that the dread she and Amy experience is contagious, so, it’s understandable that she seeks the company of others as she comes to terms with her terrible knowledge. Unfortunately, she only seems to seek out the most obnoxious people possible. Watching Jane interact with her brother’s (Chris Messina) petty and mean wife (Katie Aselton) would be funny if the metaphor of feeling disconnected at a mundane party didn’t feel so inconsequential in the face of death metaphorical or literal. Who cares if Jane doesn’t like her sister-in-law? People are dying at incredible rates both in the film and in the real world. This doesn’t matter. Even on a lesser scale, real life intrudes on the film’s metaphors. In these pandemic times, it’s infuriating to watch Jane keep interacting with people even after she must realize the death can spread. Yeah, it’s completely irrational to scream at her to self-isolate already, but it certainly doesn’t make the film any more palatable. Then again, not every viewer may have such a hard time compartmentalizing life from fantasy.
It’s hard to say definitively whether She Dies Tomorrow benefits or is hurt by the pandemic. On one hand, living with the threat of COVID-19 for months has made the concept of constant dread, imminent death and contagion resonate more than they might have in the before times. On the other, Amy, Jane and nearly everyone they encounter are so clearly privileged and so self-centered in their existential crises that their worries can seem insultingly slight rather than relatable. With their well-furnished homes, apparent lack of real jobs and flippancy about spreading their undiagnosed malaise, they seem more like the kind of selfish people going to brunch and under-tipping their waiters while protesters walk by than people who’ve ever really experienced true adversity. Seimetz certainly presents a complex existential quandary in her latest feature, but she unfortunately chooses the wrong people to explore it.
