You are going to die tomorrow. There is no question, but no rationalizing it either, just an unwavering certainty that tomorrow’s sunrise will be your last. When you tell people, at first they don’t believe you, until they believe that they will die too, just as soon as you will. It’s an unusual sort of contagion. A fear you try your best to laugh away until it’s clear how rational premonition can be. And the reality of unfinished business.
Time is short, and all you can do is make it known that you already know your coming fate. A thread that can’t be dodged no matter what anyone who can’t quite believe yet says. With She Dies Tomorrow, Amy Seimetz masterfully tackles mortality, paranoia, and the mark we wish to leave behind on the world in her sophomore feature.
Amy (Kate Lynn Sheil) knows she will die tomorrow. It’s not exactly surprising to her, she’s been on a string of bad relationships, and slipping back into alcoholism. Plus finding out she’s about to die is just one last mishap in what feels like the longest, worst day. She tells Jane (Jane Adams), an older friend of hers, whose wandering fatalism once she believes in her own imminent fate as well becomes a running gag. She is skeptical at first, but soon falls into the same conviction, even seeing a doctor demanding explanation, but never given an answer to this sinking bit of knowledge. Fear is contagious, and literally so, attendance at a birthday party on death’s eve only serves to enlighten more to her knowledge that the end is near.
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How do you make sure to leave behind a record of yourself, with life cut short so fast, but with this tugging knowledge that you still have time to prepare? Burial hides the evidence, and cremation just destroys indiscriminately. So why not make something of yourself, in the most literal sense. Breathing in the dusty smell of dry leather, scraps to piece together a jacket from, Amy knows this is what she wants to become of her. A grotesque memorial that looks beautiful yet ordinary at first glance.
It’s a morbid thought, to walk into the store and ask for your body to be skinned and worn by another once you drop dead on the back step. And it’s crueler still to hear how casual someone can take this request. We don’t know if the leatherman (yes, that really is experimental filmmaker James Benning) thinks she’s planning suicide, but what’s the difference as she knows when she’ll die anyway.
Let the sun come streaming in through the windows, warm golden light on a face so unsure of how long the world can last this way. So much sits unfinished on your dying days. Folded wallpaper yet to be hung, and a mess on the kitchen counter top no one will clean up, thinking you had some sentimental attachment to the clutter. What do you do when you know when you’ll die, and it’s so soon?
The first thing that comes to mind is always to maximize life. Riot in those final hours to get experiences skipped at the thought of consequences that could come. If not fight by living in the moment, the other option is to go gently. Falling asleep in the arms of death is a vulnerable, intimidating matter, and it’s easier to lash out than to calmly look death in the eye knowing you’re ready. Amy is maybe the bravest here, staring at the horizon in her accepting certainty, never questioning what she knows to be true.
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Fear comes best when it feels realistic, and the contagion of these deadly premonitions never defines where it begins and ends. It’s never said how they’ll die in particular, so it’s never quite clear whether believing you’ll die the next day is what makes you meet the end. Or if this realization is a warning pointing towards the inevitable, the end of the world even.
It’s terrifying to live in that uncertainty, and reactions differ as wildly as an audience for the film. Do you take it for dark comedy, revel in the last days, laughing while bleeding out in the pool, calling it one last period? Or do you take it for blood-draining horror. And float amidst the darkness, neon lights cutting past skin, and anything around obscured by darkness. Tears only begin to run once the reality hits. Staring up at the sky missing all of life not lived, waking up back flat against a rock having lost precious few hours to the gentle release brought by sleep.
Amy Seimetz has a genuine vision here, a gorgeous bit of psychodrama with an understanding of the heart of its lead character. Lit at times using more sequins then a gay bar in June, and utilizing flashing lights to tease us with a potential cheap scare the film never stoops to. It’s a stunning work of craftsmanship, even more impressive knowing it’s a self-funded passion project.
While almost teetering on the edge of overbearing at times, the music creates a coral cacophony that keeps the film on edge. The sound and light always makes it seem like death is coming, even though deep down, we know it won’t be now, but tomorrow. An overwhelming sensory experience, cinematography by Jay Keitel, and the score by composer duo Mondo Boys elevate the film to its immersive levels.
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An ensemble cast including Michelle Rodriguez, Tunde Adebimpe, Adam Wingard, Josh Lucas, Jennifer Kim, and Chris Messina lend their talents to the film’s unique darkly comic moments. And their own anxieties interplay with one another beautifully.
On the film’s contagion of realistic fears, Seimetz says “We don’t know what to do but keep living, realizing the absurdity and tragedy that ‘with life comes death’”. It’s a dark, absurd manner to call the horror itself humor. But that’s the beauty of making a film without the convention of the studio system. Seimetz’s work, especially her directorial debut Sun Don’t Shine, also starring Kate Lyn Sheil, shows the beauty that comes in creative freedom.
A passion project, She Dies Tomorrow was self-funded using Seimetz’s earnings from acting in Pet Sematary. Shot in secret using cast and crew she knew from previous projects. “The reason why I wanted to make this film was to break the narrative open and try out a new language. I love many films that use commercial language. I use commercial language in this film, but I felt the mood and tone was something I couldn’t define in neatly delineated marketing terms” she says in reference to the project, and that’s the beauty of artistic control.
Instead of waiting ten years to make a lofty project, searching for funding for a script not built around realistic indie filmmaking standards, she made a film within her power outside the studio system on her own terms. An artistic endeavor that embodies the spirit of independent cinema better than the art of waiting that so often belabors it.
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She Dies Tomorrow certainly won’t be for everyone, but it doesn’t try to be. The horror isn’t clear if it’s supernatural, or just an anxious psychological demon, but neither makes it any more scary than the other. It’s mature, not quite fitting into the recent wave of elevated horror despite its artistry. As the questions handled never feel juvenile, and it’s formatively experimental enough to challenge these new conventions.
Many argue for the film’s added weight with the recent isolation, pandemic, and worldwide uncertainty (a highly communicable deadly condition leading to anxiety upon person to person contact sound familiar at all?). But it needs none of that to work. And doesn’t need to be tied as timely for its release, as the anxiety of mortality, no matter how irrational it seems to the outside, isn’t just in this moment. If you are willing to go along for the ride, it’s a genuinely unsettling treat in its pitch-black comedy and tender acceptance of mortality, and all the spread of fear that comes with it.
She Dies Tomorrow will be available on iTunes 7th August.