Amy Seimetz's She Dies Tomorrow Explores the Terror of Anticipation

Given the current state of the world, I'm going to guess at some point in the last three months, or even weeks, you've thought about death. Director Amy Seimetz sure has, immortalized in her latest film She Dies Tomorrow (2020), released today through VOD. As you guessed from the title, Amy (Kate Lyn Sheil) thinks she is going to die tomorrow–in fact, she knows she's going to. Tears streaming down her face, she’s picked out a sequin dress to wear and drank an entire bottle of wine with the full and complete knowledge that tomorrow she will absolutely be dead. From there, her fatalistic prediction takes on a life of its own as it slowly transforms from conceptual to contagious.

The first infection begins with Jane (Jane Adams), a close friend who reluctantly shows up at Amy’s house to check on her after she suspects something is up. At first Jane dismisses Amy as drunk, depressed and paranoid, but there is something about the way Amy unequivocally proclaims her impending death that rattles Jane. It's more than a feeling, Amy insists, like when you see an accident about to happen come rushing towards you–it’s so completely out of your control that all you can do is just try to make peace with it in those final seconds. Amy’s unnerving conviction follows Jane back to her own home, where she is suddenly struck by the urge to seek out company so that she too can share the knowledge that she will die tomorrow.

It’s one thing to know that death is inevitable, but it’s another thing to anticipate its inevitability. Whenever I hear that somebody has died, my mind tends to wander towards all the mundane things they're going to miss out on in the immediate future. I think about what movies they won't get to see, or what television shows they'll never get to finish; I think about the technology they'll never get to experience, or the medical advancements that could have put off the inevitable had they lived a couple more years. This then spirals into thinking about their legacy and how eventually everybody who knew them directly will also die. This lends me to thinking about how many people are remembered in a hundred years' time, or how many of those figures will still be forgotten thousands of years in the future. Which in turn makes me think about how fleeting the entirety of existence is, and how infinite the uncaring universe is in comparison to the sadness of it all. It's around then that I get struck by that nauseating lightning bolt of mortality. One of those hits where you realize that this moment of existential clarity is in itself pointless–a shared experience that has been and will be perpetually replicated by the hundreds of billions who have come before and after you.

The brilliance of She Dies Tomorrow is in how it weaponizes the anxiety of anticipation. The finality of death, in comparison, feels far less terrifying than having to live in fear of its inevitability. The film’s atmosphere of paranoia is enhanced through microscopic views of various liquid and cellular matter, mirrored in closeups on characters’ expressions. The effect is that of an uncomfortable intimacy, the tight focus on faces leaving each characters’ innermost insecurities exposed and their bodies seemingly vulnerable to sneak attacks. Where in films like It Follows or Final Destination we recoil at seeing the specter of death move towards our main characters, She Dies Tomorrow makes you almost long for death when faced with the seemingly unending torture of anticipation.

Seimetz skillfully toys with the audience’s own expectations of dread, using typical horror jump cuts to show her characters instead coming back to life, jarred awake from nightmares or oppressive memories. The only apparition of dread we are shown comes to each character in the form of flashing blue and red lights; invoking the feeling of coming home to your family only to see police cars parked directly outside your house. They’re a symbol of menace as much as they’re emblematic of relief, which is a concept that resonates even louder in light of the current protests around the country.

That this anxiety is amorphous and interpretive, shifting in form as it passes from each of the film’s characters throughout the night, only heightens its terror. When we meet Amy she is trying to operate under the oppressive weight of forcing herself to live moment to moment; a scenario that anybody who has suffered from or experienced the effects of severe depression will find familiar. In an attempt to get the most out of the minutes and hours she has left to live, Amy repeatedly grounds herself through touch and repetition; putting the same song on repeat, communing with nature through touch, or pressing her body into walls. She even tries to lay as flat on the floor as she can, but her anxiety still manages to find her there, she is forced to get up when she realizes how sad it is to think how wood was once alive too.

For all of its unsettling scenes, She Dies Tomorrow is also a dryly funny film that doesn’t shy away from laughing at its own hysteria. As the virus spreads its absurdity grows; from Jane, disheveled and in her pajamas, crashing her sister-in-law’s birthday party to essentially do her best nihilistic impersonation of Rachel Dratch, to party-goer Brian whose girlfriend waits to break up with him after he removes his father from life support, to said sister-in-law waking up her teen daughter just to tell her it’s okay, mommy and daddy are going to die tomorrow. This creeping anxiety as it spreads throughout acquaintances heightens in insanity and violence, culminating in a final scene that feels like a mash up between Twin Peaks and a millennial stoner comedy.

Yet as Amy’s story progresses it takes the opposite route, starting off seemingly irreverent and revealing itself to be increasingly disturbing. In a lot of ways, She Dies Tomorrow is a classic female anxiety film, dealing directly with burdens that most women will find familiar, from randomly escalating male violence to the pressures of having children or feeling compelled to leave some sort of selfless legacy. A lot of this anxiety is channeled through Amy’s interactions with Craig, her relatively new beau with whom she takes a weekend trip to the desert. Craig is also key to the root of this death curse, which we find out originates in a horrific experience that is slowly unfolded through a series of flashbacks. It’s so jarring that it in itself becomes a sort of death for Amy, an experience which irrevocably changes her outlook and haunts her every waking hour.

For a film that revels in an oppressive subject matter, Seimetz does an excellent job of corralling any potential for pretentiousness with a masterful build up of suspense, guillotine-like editing, and just the right amount of gallows humor. Death may be coming for us all but self-awareness is the true inescapable evil, with empathy as its comically grim side effect. By the end of the film, Amy moves past her room, past her apartment, and presses herself further and further into the wilderness. It’s an attempted return to nature, a quixotic mission to find primordial comfort in the womb of the world. But like all microscopic invasive matter, we can only thrive so long until we too are eventually expelled.

She Dies Tomorrow is now available on most digital platforms and at select drive-in theaters.