She Dies Tomorrow

Locations
Call Number: DVD Horror She
On Shelf At: Downtown Library, Malletts Creek Branch, Pittsfield Branch, Traverwood Branch, Westgate Branch

Originally released as a motion picture in 2020.
Wide screen (16x9).
Kate Lyn Sheil, Jane Adams, Kentucker Audley, Katie Aselton, Chris Messina, Tunde Adebimpe, Jennifer Kim, Josh Lucas, Adam Wingard, Michelle Rodriguez, Olivia Taylor Dudley.
After waking up convinced that she is going to die tomorrow, Amy's carefully mended life begins to unravel. As her delusions of certain death become contagious to those around her, Amy and her friends' lives spiral out of control in a tantalizing descent into madness.
DVD, NTSC, region 1; wide screen (16x9); 5.1 surround.

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

What if the worst thing to happen to you was also the most liberating? submitted by oriolbt on June 25, 2023, 12:21pm Months after watching this film, I can't stop worrying at it like a tongue probing at an open sore in the mouth. Unconsciously, my mind reaches out, and touching on the acrid shapes this film conjures up it flinches back reflexively, curling away. This movie is a horrible brainworm of a fable that director Amy Seimetz executes with sober, almost brutalist restraint.

**SPOILERS FOLLOW**

Amy has this thing bugging her. She's convinced she dies tomorrow. She doesn't know how she'll die (or how she knows), but she's deeply, unshakably certain she will. And what's worse, it's contagious. Anyone she shares this feeling with soon adopts the conviction that they, too, will die the following day — and anyone they tell, and so on.

The film is, smartly, completely unconcerned with the origin of this idea, freeing the viewer's imagination to provide possible explanations and explore them to our own satisfaction. Two possibilities I entertained were some lovecraftian entity that feeds on the grief and dread of those it infects (like so many Stephen King antagonists), or, alternately, a form of mass hysteria like the dancing plague. Someone on letterboxd described this movie as "the movie version of that thing where you don't know where to hold your tongue in your mouth." Which brings us back to the open sore...

The film's raw emotional core comes from the empathy with which it treats its subjects. Sure, characters succumb to the fear or give in to their weakest tendencies (one couple infects their child in a sick marriage of radical transparency and toxic positivity). But in its searing, white-hot focus on our awareness of our own fragile mortality—the arbitrary randomness of death, the totally imaginary film of security we project onto ourselves at all times—the movie also dissolves the doubting membrane between desire and action, between wanting and doing. Characters end stagnant relationships and sever family members' life support. They try to have meaningful physical connections with one another, their candor and spontaneity bracingly refreshing despite these efforts' lack of success. And the film's compassion extends beyond the interpersonal: the opening sequence finds Amy in her house as she plays the same song on repeat or runs her fingers across the textures of her home, as if trying not just to receive the sensory impressions of the world around her, but to impress herself upon it.

Ultimately, several of them achieve something resembling serenity, or at least equilibrium, reflecting on the things they'll miss when they're dead. Granted, this sense of peace (or is it resignation? complacency?) might come at the cost of offloading their guilt onto someone else (again, the mechanics of the illness are blissfully obscure). In the title track off his album "Fear of Death", Tim Heidecker sings "fear of death is keeping me alive". And while this is undoubtedly true, this film inverts the axiom, posing it as a question: "how might the fear of death keep us from living?" And THAT is the idea the film is most interested in making communicable.

This film wants you to wrestle with it, to work through it, to slip your oyster knife into the sharp and abrasive shell and maybe even draw blood on it before you taste the sweet, brackish, slippery morsel within.