She Dies Tomorrow Review

2020 has been a year with numerous small, philosophically rich films released on demand, and with She Dies Tomorrow, director, writer and producer Amy Seimetz tackles perhaps the heaviest subject of them all; the looming inevitability of our own mortality. As someone who’s had my own existential crisis or two on the subject, this is a film that I found myself able to relate to, and within it are quite a lot of interesting musings on the nature of our inevitable demise – despite how uneven the film as a whole often is.

She Dies Tomorrow is essentially a meditation on this inevitability, representing the realization of one’s own mortality as a sort of contagious delusion spreading throughout a group of people, starting with a girl named Amy. These people all become unshakably convinced that they will die the next day. The film follows them throughout a single night as they try to come to terms with their perceived imminent demise, and tie up the loose ends of their life.

As someone who’s been through a more realistic and grounded version of this sort of mortality-induced existential crisis, there’s a really fascinating insight here as to the spread of ideas through words. Other people don’t really come down with the delusion until someone else starts to talk about it with them. When I was at my lowest points, I was afraid to talk to other people about my problems, because I was worried that I was going to pass some sort of horrific, forbidden knowledge that would forever change the person I was venting to and drag them down to the exact same place I was.

Looking over the marketing and framing of this film tells me that there is an urge to pass this off as a horror film. For sure, there’s a sense of dread lingering over it, and there’s not much else that’s more frightening than actually facing the prospect of one’s own end head on. She Dies Tomorrow isn’t truly a horror film though – it far more resembles a character drama, ultimately ending on the note that these people are, to some extent, liberated by this realization. By the end, the protagonist Amy is still scared, and clearly warring within herself over whether or not she’s ever going to be okay with this revelation. But her, among everyone else, seem to in a way be bettered by their experience. All throughout the film, we see people motivated by their crises to refocus their lives, hone in on what’s most important and take the steps they had meant to do for so long but were afraid to. There’s a newfound appreciation for life and the small things that we take for granted every day. Throughout the first act, we see Amy moving around, touching everything, allowing herself to take in and feel the environments around her, as if she’s fully embracing her own senses and the world around her in one last heartfelt goodbye. One gets the sense that, despite the bleakness of the situation, this is the most powerful and important day she’s had in quite some time.

Overall, She Dies Tomorrow can best be described as a mixture of art film and character drama. When it lets its more artistic side loose, it’s hypnotic and profound. The wordless scenes of Amy embracing the world and saying goodbye to her senses and making the most of her final day are intimate and moving, and there are some borderline nightmarish but unforgettable scenes of surrealism that will likely stay with me for a while (epilepsy warning though: DO NOT WATCH THIS MOVIE IF YOU ARE PRONE TO EPILEPTIC SEIZURES). The origin of the delusion is only vaguely hinted at and never fully explained, and the film is better for it, because it doesn’t matter – all that matters is the effect it has and the themes it represents.

Where She Dies Tomorrow falters is in its character drama. The characters are not particularly deep and Amy is perhaps the most likeable one, but when it branches out into others it begins to lose its steam. The repetition of people saying “I’m going to die tomorrow” and the cues with which the film expresses that the delusion has caught on are repetitive and hamfisted, and the dialogue is just barely unable to escape the uncanny valley. It oftentimes feels like the dialogue between characters is trying to be both artsy and realistic at the same time, but comes off pretentious and out of touch. There’s just something off about how people talk in this film because it’s not truly able to capture how people actually communicate with each other.

The first thirty minutes of the film are filled with quiet, intimate moments embracing the arthouse nature of its ambitions, but after that, it becomes bogged down with this hamfisted dialogue between uninteresting characters (one particularly poorly done scene involves a group of characters fascinated with the idea of the sexual activity of dolphins), and frankly the film lost its hold on me. The middle act especially is somewhat of a slog as Seimetz plays her cards too obviously and seems to hammer her point home with far too much ferocity. I felt almost as if she was spelling everything out, which took a lot of the mystery and tension out of it.

The ending does wrap things up on a suitably poignant note, with a scene of two women talking about the things they’re going to miss – “I love trees,” one of them says. “I’m gonna miss them.” They are taking the time to enjoy the things in life that they take for granted, saying goodbye. We then cut to Amy staring at a mountain range, repeating “I’m okay… I’m not okay…” to herself as she readies herself for the end.

The protagonists name being the same as that of the director may be a coincidence, but it doesn’t quite come across that way to me. It suggests that, perhaps, Amy Seimetz envisions herself as being the one who is spreading this “delusion” to us, in the form of a film that is meant to get us to confront our own mortality head on. Doing so may be frightening and scary, but in the end it can set us free, and let us pay more attention to the wonderful things around us every day that we take for granted. It can motivate us to do the things we put off, and appreciate what’s most important.

I think this is an ambitious and noble goal, and I think somewhere within the uninteresting character drama this core theme still shines. I just wish I could actually recommend the film as a good film, and not just as an interesting theme trapped in a flawed viewing experience. It falls short as a character drama, and because of its emphasis on that it falls short as an art film too. Its redeeming quality is in the power of its message, but even that can only take it so far.