‘She Dies Tomorrow': Amy Seimetz-Directed Indie Plays Like A Pretentious Student Film [Review]

I’m noticing early reviews for Amy Seimetz’s “She Dies Tomorrow” are overwhelmingly positive. These raves seem to be another byproduct of the times we live in because, quite frankly, Seimetz’s film, which I saw via SXSW digital, is an underwhelming dud.

Seimetz’s ex is Shane Carruth and you can see the influence of his brilliantly surreal style all over “She Dies Tomorrow,” which tackles our fear of mortality — how relevant considering it’s being released during a pandemic. Too bad the resulting film feels like a pretentious experimental student film rather than actual cinema.

The film begins and ends with Amy (Kate Lyn Sheil), a millennial plagued by unspoken anxiety, who believes that she is going to die the next day. Why does she believe such a morose end awaits her? She has no idea, and we don’t either, but she’s convinced it’s happening. And so, Amy strolls through the movie in a half-asleep state. The dread she feels is entirely subjective to her and the viewer. Things get murkier when Amy calls her friend Jane (Jane Adams) to come over to try to explain what she feels. Bewildered, Jane is confused; Amy is not sick, she’s not suicidal, she’s just certain about her fate. After their brief encounter, this same crippling existential dread somehow spreads to Jane, who in turn spreads it to others. Unlike COVID-19, this is an existential virus.

I get what Seimetz is trying to do here: she’s attempting to build up an artful sense of dread for the viewer through surreal atmosphere, jarring editing techniques and unnerving sound design (David Lynch is also a major influence). In other words, she wants her film to be vaguely eerie, very much in the same vein as Carruth and Lynch’s cinema. She’s in over her head though, making “She Dies Tomorrow” more about mood than message, avoiding conventional storytelling in favor of vagueness. Seimetz is less interested in giving us answers as she is in trying to make us feel her main character’s excruciating anxiety. Kudos to DP Jay Keitel for infusing the film with rich blues and reds, but a film cannot solely rely on visual wonders to grab my attention.

Seimetz showed great promise with her 2012 debut, “Sun Don’t Shine,” and you can’t help but admire the sheer ambition Seimetz goes for here, but it all feels too disconnected, too unfocused, and it doesn’t help that there is absolutely no energy to this film. It’s a thud, it just lays there, an immovable object that feels more like artifact than cinema. [D]