Final Destination: "She Dies Tomorrow" favors feeling over story in a transfixing Rorschach test

She Dies Tomorrow (2020)

84 min.

Release Date: July 31, 2020 (Drive-In Theaters); August 7, 2020 (On Demand)

We are all going to die. That much is certain. The question of when that will happen is unknown, but it is inevitable. So what if we had the foresight of our expiration dates on this planet being imminent, like tomorrow? Actor and filmmaker Amy Seimetz self-finances her sophomore writing-directing effort behind the lens, while reportedly cashing in her paycheck on the “Pet Sematary” remake, to make “She Dies Tomorrow,” an experimental study in existential dread that explores such a concept with an artistically surreal audacity and yet few resources. Favoring ambiguity and experimenting with narrative form, this is esoteric cinema that will fall into the “easy to admire but hard to warm to” category. For those, however, who do settle in and get on the same wavelength with what Seimetz wants to say about fear and anxiety becoming contagious, “She Dies Tomorrow” can be a beautifully strange and transfixing Rorschach test.

It’s the end of her life as recovering alcoholic Amy (Kate Lyn Sheil) knows it, and she is not feeling fine. After realizing that her boyfriend was telling the truth when there was no tomorrow for him, Amy returns the next morning to her newly purchased house, which she hasn’t finished unpacking. She calls her best friend, neurotic homebody scientist Jane (Jane Adams), and wants her to come over. Jane panics, “Don’t do anything you might regret. Go for a walk, or why don’t you try watching a movie?” “Movie’s an hour and a half,” Amy replies. When Jane knocks on Amy’s door later, she finds her sequin dress-clad friend, having fallen off the wagon, drinking lots of Pinot Grigio and using a leaf blower in the backyard. Amy seems to be having a relapse and a breakdown of some sort, until the feeling of dying tomorrow spreads to Jane. With Amy long gone, Jane has nowhere to go but, in her pajamas, to her brother Jason (Chris Messina) and his wife Susan’s (Katie Aselton) house, where she looks crazy interrupting her sister-in-law’s birthday party she originally blew off. There is no tomorrow for any of them. 

A minimalist cinematic death rattle, “She Dies Tomorrow” is not about how Amy and everyone else will die, but how they feel about knowing they will die and the ongoing infection of that thought. While all of them experience red and blue strobes (a hypnotic visual indicator), some of them want to be alone, repeatedly playing Mozart on a turntable, and others do not. Many enter primitive states, whether it’s humming a song their mother used to sing or hearing their late mother’s voice. Jane may engage in some end-of-the-world sex with her doctor (Josh Lucas), until that just doesn’t happen. Writer-director Amy Seimetz also brings a dark sense of humor in Lynchian fashion. For example, Amy does some online shopping, morbidly searching cremation urns, and tells Jane she wants to be useful in death, wishing to be made into a leather jacket. If that’s not funny to some, a later scene involves Jane’s neurosis when she walks in on her sister-in-law insisting she and her friends, Brian (Tunde Adebimpe) and Tilly (Jennifer Kim), talk about dolphin sex.

Led by Kate Lyn Sheil’s strikingly raw performance, the cast—all of them in the director’s indie filmmaking circuit, as well as a surprise cameo by Michelle Rodriguez—brings total belief to this story. Though it is pretty straightforward without being plot-concentrated, “She Dies Tomorrow” is more about an amorphous, premonitory feeling and mood than a clear-cut narrative. There is a transmissible feeling in the air, not unlike the chain-letter contagion that allows sexually active people to see murderous apparitions like in “It Follows” or, like in “The Ring,” the videotape that kills you in seven days if you watch it. If this mood piece were released any other year, it might play differently. In 2020, “She Dies Tomorrow” incidentally ends up feeling rather timely and low-key distressing for this particular moment.

Grade: B -