In She Dies Tomorrow, Amy (Kate Lyn Sheil) is certain that she’s going to die tomorrow. She’s so certain of it that she’s spending her time online researching the price of urns and the possibility of having her skin turned into a leather jacket after she’s gone. When her friend Jane (Jane Adams) shows up at Amy’s house that night, Amy is in her backyard in a sparkly evening dress, drinking wine and using a leaf blower. That’s clearly the behavior of a woman who no longer cares what happens to her.
For its first 20 minutes or so, She Dies Tomorrow seems like the story of a depressed alcoholic who has given up on life, with this sort of metaphysical certainty of impending death as a stand-in for substance abuse and clinical depression. Amy wanders around her newly purchased house in a daze, having returned from what appears to be an altercation with an angry boyfriend (Kentucker Audley). When Jane arrives, she assures Amy that she’ll still be alive tomorrow, that she needs to sober up and get some rest. Then Jane goes home, goes into her art studio and attempts to work, only to stop cold with a revelation of her own: She, too, is going to die tomorrow.
Amy’s assertion becomes a sort of contagion, as Jane heads to a birthday party for her sister-in-law Susan (Katie Aselton), telling her brother Jason (Chris Messina) and the other party guests about her impending demise. Everyone who hears about someone else’s conviction of imminent death starts to feel the same way themselves. It’s an inherently creepy idea and one that has become inadvertently timely in the months since writer-director Amy Seimetz’s film was first scheduled to premiere at the (eventually canceled) South by Southwest Film Festival in March. But just because the concept carries added resonance in our current moment doesn’t mean that Seimetz’s vague, wispy exploration of it is effective.
Although there are a handful of truly unsettling moments, Seimetz doesn’t treat She Dies Tomorrow as a horror movie, even a slow and brooding one. It’s more of an abstract exploration of existential dread in which characters have realizations about their deaths accompanied by flashing colored lights and quick cuts of almost subliminal images from their subconscious. Jane’s artwork involves magnified photographs of oozing liquids under a microscope, and Seimetz frequently inserts those images between scenes, accompanied by ominous music, to indicate dread without building it into the narrative.
There’s no suspense to the story, and there’s very little character development, although the movie eventually flashes back to Amy’s ill-fated vacation with her boyfriend, providing an origin story of sorts for the infection (or at least for Amy’s connection to it). She Dies Tomorrow is more of a mood piece than a cohesive story, jumping around among characters who speak mainly in cryptic musings about mortality. Seimetz is primarily known as an actor (this is only her second feature as a writer and director, after 2012’s Sun Don’t Shine), and She Dies Tomorrow is a strong showcase for its stars, who get to wallow in anguish and sorrow as the characters are forced to confront their own mortality.
She Dies Tomorrow conveys a sense of free-floating anxiety without building to any kind of catharsis or revelation, even as the story seems to be obliquely heading toward a large-scale apocalypse. With their deaths looming, some characters go numb, while others cling to what’s most important to them. Amy drives out to the desert to rent a dune buggy. Jane tries to create one last piece of art. A couple who were attending Susan’s birthday party commit a shocking act of either mercy or cruelty. Eventually, there’s implied violence, but it’s depicted almost as an afterthought. If this is the end of the world, most people are remarkably chill about it.
That detached tone makes the movie less engaging, though, and without any substantive plot threads, all that’s left is the ill-defined subtext. It’s not tough to see the parallels to the uneasiness of modern life, even pre-pandemic, and to the way that dangerous ideas spread like contagions via social media. Seimetz naming the main character after herself could make the movie a metaphor for filmmaking, as the director imbues the actors with emotions that they then play out. Or it could make the story an expression of Seimetz’s own sense of fatalistic doom about life.
It could be all of those things, or none of them, and the movie is too ponderous to settle on a particular point of view. The ambiguity is meant to be disturbing, but too often it’s just dull. “Are we already dead?” Jane asks numbly at Susan’s birthday party. The frustrating thing about She Dies Tomorrow is that the answer doesn’t seem to matter.
Starring Kate Lyn Sheil, Jane Adams, Chris Messina, Katie Aselton, Kentucker Audley, Tunde Adebimpe, Jennifer Kim and Josh Lucas, She Dies Tomorrow is now playing in select theaters and is available August 7 on VOD.