Die Tomor­row

Dur­ing the fair­ly curt run­time of Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit’s Die Tomor­row, 8,442 peo­ple from around the world will have per­ished, per the director’s cal­cu­la­tions. Thank­ful­ly, this qui­et­ly amaz­ing film offers a Zen poet­ry anti­dote to our col­lec­tive fear of mortality.

It begins with what appears to be doc­u­men­tary footage of a father explain­ing death to his young daugh­ter who is strapped in the back of their sta­tion wag­on. She explodes in tears, as if she’s just been told her birth­day par­ty has been can­celled. ​“Every­one even­tu­al­ly dies?! You’re kid­ding, right?” Fol­low­ing this amus­ing pro­logue, the film adopts a more wist­ful tone as it col­lects togeth­er news snip­pets of peo­ple dying, and then builds an imag­i­nary vignette to flesh out how the spec­tre of death exists in dai­ly life.

For exam­ple, one episode tells of a film star who dies in a car acci­dent dur­ing a shoot, and this is realised through a tran­quil take of her young co-star attempt­ing to process the sud­den loss. Ear­li­er on, we hear of a female stu­dent who wan­dered down to a gro­cery store to pick up some beer for a par­ty ahead of her grad­u­a­tion cer­e­mo­ny. She was killed when a car crashed into the front of the store.

Nawapol illus­trates the melan­cholic aspect of this ran­dom acci­dent by imag­in­ing a scene of the girl and her roomies in their dorm chat­ting, being sil­ly, doing their make-up and lay­ing out future plans. If it sounds over­ly por­ten­tous and insen­si­tive, that couldn’t be fur­ther from the real­i­ty. These scenes play out in a mode of lyri­cal nat­u­ral­ism in which there’s no sense that these play­ers are able to com­pre­hend the grim fate that awaits them.

The most mov­ing sequence involves a women cut­ting a man’s toe­nails pri­or to him, the next day, board­ing the fate­ful Malaysia Air­lines flight to the US which, to this day, remains unac­count­ed for. It’s a pro­found and imag­i­na­tive film that calls into ques­tion how we rep­re­sent death and dying on screen, but it also man­ages to explore, with lan­guorous lucid­i­ty, how there are no answers beyond per­son­al impulse when it comes to con­sol­ing peo­ple about their inevitable vis­it to the great beyond.