Guest Post: She Dies Tomorrow (2020)

She Dies Tomorrow and is Dragging Everyone Down with Her'

By Jonas Schwartz

It's impossible to imagine what it would have been like to watch the existential horror film She Dies Tomorrow as it was originally planned.  The script was both developed and shot pre-Covid-19. The quarantine soaks through this thriller unintendedly, and what may have originally seemed morbid and convoluted, is now prescient. 

Amy (Kate Lyn Sheil) is dying tomorrow. Though there's zero tangible evidence, she just knows and accepts that tomorrow she will be dead.  She tells this to her close friend Jane (Jane Adams, Happiness) who worries greatly about Amy. However, after studying magnified blood, Jane now is also convinced she will die tomorrow. And like victims in a Vidal Sassoon commercial, she tells two friends and they tell two friends and so on and so on. Before the day is over, many people are sure they will be dead tomorrow.

She Dies Tomorrow is a movie born in blood.  According to an article in Film Comment magazine, Writer/Director Amy Amy Seimetz financed the movie from her paycheck as the doomed mother in the remake of Stephen King's Pet Sematary (2019). Even for someone who has not read the article, it's apparent watching this methodical film, that it's a passion project for Seimetz. She has gathered a recognizable cast, including Adams, Chris Messina (The Mindy Project), Michelle Rodriguez (Girlfight and TV's Lost) and Josh Lucas (Ford Vs Ferrari). Psychedelic in how it flashes primary colors and how the images of blood resemble a lava lamp, the film is a slow burn, one that may not have been as fulfilling if the audience's mindset wasn't where it is at this moment. We all wake up daily to discover how many people in our county/state/country have died due to Covid-19. Death surrounds us all, haunts us like a emerging specter, coming closer to our inner circle. 

The script is dreamlike, with less of a through line than a slithering enemy passing from one to another. Reminiscent of It Follows with its infectious current, She Dies Tomorrow feels most like the 1998 Don McKellar film Last Night starring Sandra Oh, where it is irrelevant why people are dying, but is more fixated on how the characters react to the inevitability. Once the characters in She Dies Tomorrow discover they will die, the script concerns itself only with how they chose to live their last day. There is a flashback of how the disease crossed over to the central characters , but no indication what the illness is, what caused it, and why people are dying. It's not the story Seimetz has chosen to tell. 

The cast, once they come to their own realizations, enter states of euphoria, depression, and numbness to illustrate the unavoidability. Sheil carries many scenes in silence, particularly in the opening 10 minutes or so. 

Dazzling in ways, and lackadaisical in others, She Dies Tomorrow is an odd acid trip. But it just may be the catharsis required for this pandemic. The sooner we accept the disease for what it is, and what damage it can cause, the sooner we can react in more constructive ways to the limitations our lives now demand.

Jonas Schwartz is Vice President / Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle,  West Coast Critic for TheaterMania, Contributing Critic for Broadway World, and a Contributing Critic for ArtsInLA