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She Dies Tomorrow (Amy Seimetz, 2020)
🕑 Added 2020-08-14 10:57:42 +0000 UTC
[SPOILERS, I SUPPOSE]
While watching She Dies Tomorrow, I found myself puzzling over a problem that I eventually worked out into a relatively straightforward proposition. For the time being, I'm calling it the Imitation Fallacy: you can do all the things that "good films" do without making a good film. There's a great deal to admire about She Dies Tomorrow, and for the first twenty minutes or so I thought I might be watching one of the best films of the year. However, writer-director Amy Seimetz seems to be following a number of art film and elevated-horror byways on the assumption that in the end, they will get her somewhere. The results are mixed.
By sheer chance, I watched she Dies Tomorrow after enduring a systematic revisiting of the first two seasons of "The Leftovers," a TV show I had only sporadically watched back when it was first in production six years ago. And like "The Leftovers," She Dies Tomorrow adopts a cosmic premise, on the assumption that it will reveal the uncanny at the heart of the banal. It attempts to gain some of its unnerving tension by zeroing in on the breakdown of individual psychology within a scenario that appears to render the notion of individuality almost moot.
After all, death isn't just the great equalizer. If everyone is dying at the same time, and everybody knows it, then there is no longer a real one-to-one reckoning with Death. No making peace with one's God, no final embrace with one's family, no confronting the Dasein, no nothing. Everyone is in the same boat. She Dies Tomorrow introduces this concept as if it were a conceptual virus, in the vein of Pontypool and It Follows, but by the time the film has meandered to its awkward conclusion, we are firmly in Abel Ferrara / Don McKellar territory, where everyone knows it's all over, for some unknown reason, and they're all just waiting for the Big One.
There are some masterful moments in She Dies Tomorrow, and they mostly center around Amy (Kate Lyn Sheil), isolated in her new home, struggling to figure out why she feels the way she does and how she is going to deal with the remaining hours of dead future. In the sequence that made me think the film was going to really bat for the rafters, Amy plays and restarts a LP of Mozart's Lacrimosa no less that four times. Seimetz shows Amy resetting the record in a set of identical shots, emphasizing the jarring repetition of the scene. Is the film going to stick us in an undefined loop?
But instead, we are dropped into a series of loosely connected sketches, some of them compelling in their own right, others not so much. Jane Adams is wonderful as Amy's friend / possible AA sponsor, a scientifically oriented artist whose lack of people skills is genuinely tragicomic. (A monologue at an emergency room, in which Jane tries to seduce the doctor with her hypochondria, is a high point.) But other moments, including some scattered moments with Sheil, are utterly disposable.
There's quite a lot of value here, but it ultimately doesn't come together, and it wouldn't be such a problem, but She Dies Tomorrow exhibits -- dare I say? -- a bit of a millennial swagger, a confidence that it never entirely earns. It's easy to see why. This film includes illegibly underlit cinematography, brash music cues that shock-cut to silence, abstract, Brakhage-lite visual interludes, psychological opacity, and a central narrative enigma that remains unexplained for the viewer, presumably to allow him or her to walk away with "more questions than answers." Amy Seimetz has read the rule book. But sometimes that's just not enough.
