She Dies Tomorrow

She Dies Tomor­row is your worst night­mare. You awake from it, breath­ing heav­i­ly, but your mind’s still there. Where in her first film, Sun Don’t Shine, direc­tor Amy Seimetz oper­at­ed on a sin­gle oneir­ic lay­er, her sec­ond is a palimpsest of anx­i­ety. But they feel con­nect­ed in their trau­mas, with lead actor Kate Lyn Sheil drag­ging us kick­ing and scream­ing through the uncon­scious of her char­ac­ter, named Amy in a semi-auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal wink. It’s not a jour­ney for the faint of heart.

I know She Dies Tomor­row is your worst night­mare because that’s how the nar­ra­tive oper­ates. Once you’ve caught the dis­ease, the cer­tain­ty of immi­nent death, noth­ing else mat­ters and slow­ly all the char­ac­ters spi­ral into the pit of depression.

At first glance it seems to be doing some­thing sim­i­lar to It Fol­lows by David Robert Mitchell in its psy­cho­so­mat­ic form of con­ta­gion, but where that film fell into stale con­ven­tion, She Dies Tomor­row con­tin­u­al­ly rein­vents itself. The result feels akin to clas­sic anthol­o­gy hor­ror like 1945’s Dead of Night, con­nect­ed by uni­ver­sal dread but with a jar­ring effect which pre­vents cer­tain char­ac­ters we’d like to spend more time with from being developed.

Nonethe­less, through­out the film Seimetz over­whelms us in its claus­tro­pho­bic atmos­phere. Sun Don’t Shine echoed oth­er women-direct­ed road movies, espe­cial­ly Bar­bara Loden’s Wan­da and Kel­ly Reichardt’s Riv­er of Grass, by iron­i­cal­ly jux­ta­pos­ing the con­fined space of the car with the expanse of the Amer­i­can outdoors.

She Dies Tomor­row, mean­while, owes more to the psy­che­del­ic hor­rors of Gas­par Noé or Jonathan Glaz­er in its dark spaces, which occa­sion­al­ly erupt into a fren­zy of neon light. Seimetz pairs these moments with footage of blood-like sub­stances in extreme close-up sim­i­lar to the uncom­fort­able exper­i­ments of Stan Brakhage, such as Moth­light. If Sun Don’t Shine is day, She Dies Tomor­row is unmis­tak­ably night.

This intox­i­cat­ing visu­al style is enhanced by the Mon­do Boys’ orig­i­nal score, throb­bing and pul­sat­ing with the quick­en­ing spread of the men­tal pan­dem­ic. The music is an exten­sion of the ​‘Lac­rimosa’ from Mozart’s Requiem which Amy repeat­ed­ly plays on her record play­er, a piece only a char­ac­ter as accept­ing of her inevitable demise as she could dance to. It’s a danse macabre, the medieval alle­go­ry of humanity’s union in death, and a memen­to mori straight from the plague era – delayed in its release due to COVID-19, it’s all fright­en­ing­ly à pro­pos.

Per­haps it’s a bless­ing then that She Dies Tomor­row has emerged now. Rather than drag­ging us down with it, the film is a reminder that it’s alright to be fright­ened, to have days when every­thing feels like too much. Just as Amy wakes up in the night­mare at the start, it’s mir­rored with a cycli­cal shot at the end – she’s bro­ken out of her house and found her way toward the light. We won­der where she’s going next, but some­thing tells us she’ll live tomor­row after all.