One of my favorite book series has to be the Thursday Next series from author Jasper Fforde. Following a former soldier who becomes a detective in literature crimes—that is: crimes that take place inside books—they are endlessly funny and entertaining, even for someone who misses many of the literary references. I bring this up here because, near the end of the series, there is a subplot in which a villain tortures a character with a mindworm, implanting the idea that the character has a daughter. The fictional daughter’s absence is constantly distressing and, in a series I otherwise think about for its whimsy and inventive plots, that mindworm is truly, hauntingly terrifying.
I can’t explain what happens to Amy (Kate Lyn Sheil) in She Dies Tomorrow without thinking of that mindworm. One minute Amy is on a weekend trip with her boyfriend; the next she is slammed with an alarming but unavoidable truth: she is goes to die the next day. Relapsing into a drunken fugue state of sorts, she calls her friend Jane (Jane Adams) for support…but the initially skeptical Jane soon realizes the same thing: her death is 24 hours away as well. Slowly this urgent tragic fact swings through a string of contacts via Jane and Amy as the night approach midnight and all brace for that frightful arrival of tomorrow.
As someone who often struggles with warping his own reality, She Dies Tomorrow spread its fugue-like state through the TV to me: on numerous occasions I found myself gasping to take in breaths because I had been too absorbed in the film to bother with respiration. It helps that the film is suffocating in its focus, featuring long close-up shots of faces as they crumble under the onset ting knowledge of their own finity. There are these flashing multi-colored lights and a chorus of mostly indecipherable whispers that accompany many of these shots; they shouldn’t be frightening but they unsettled me enough that I actually averted my eyes during the second half. Woven in too are images from cellular slides under a microscope and, particularly post-COVID, they delivered a mesmerizing menace to the film. Is the clearly contagious condition biological in nature? A psychological issue? Something extraterrestrial, or maybe even celestial or divine?
Much slower than the onset of this mortal awareness arrives a disconcerting realization: the reason why, the rate of spread, the origins, even the ultimate outcomes for each character’s respective tomorrow are irrelevant. If you know you are doomed to die tomorrow, you can’t waste time investigating how you came to that conclusion and you can’t throwaway time nursing possibilities for the next day. You will be dead. You know this. How do you live in that state if heightened awareness? It’s just like Fforde’s character with the mindworm: if you know you have a daughter and your family is in trouble, you will desperately look for her. The love is real, even if the object isn’t, just as imminent death is real for Amy, Jane, and company, even if it conceivably maybe isn’t.
Assuming you are suffering from psychosis or a mass delusion is a gamble. If you know your death is tomorrow, are you willing to gamble those final hours away? Director Amy Seimetz wisely grounds this film in a narrow corner: for these characters fated to die, there is no room for concern about the world beyond them. “It doesn’t matter,” one character says in the second half. “Not any more.” I’d like to argue with them but I can’t. These are their last hours of life. Who am I to say what is important for them?
The cast of She Dies Tomorrow sells the collective psychosis and thrive in those tight shots that Seimetz employs. We can see the wide spectrum of emotions in their eyes with heartbreaking clarity. I watched this on the treadmill, a few feet away from the large screen, and I’m glad I did as anything less would have obscured the momentary twitches of eyes and the subtle circling of lips. Sheil and Adams in particular underline everything great about the film, Sheil by racing through a casserole of emotions within single sentences and sporting resigned and fatigued body language that conveys her inner turbulence and Adams with a haunting glazed-over look of wonderment that accompanies every line of fatalistic dialogue. We learn a ton about these two across the film’s lean 90 minute runtime, but those profiles do nothing to repair the central dilemma. Both are going to die. Soon. They are certain. There’s no time to mask anything.
The critic whose praise motivated my viewing described She Dies Tomorrow as a psychological horror film but I might submit that this landed for me like a sharp horror film would. By mid-movie, I became aware of sounds around me, I began glancing at the door and hallway in search of approaching shadows; I was in threat-detection mode, my senses heightened by the hypnotic fear in the film. Unlike some of my favorite horror films, though, She Dies Tomorrow refuses to indulge in any closure or rationality that lets the viewer off the hook. Will Amy and Jane and Jason and Susan and Brian and Tilly and Madison and Beardo die tomorrow? I’m pretty sure I know the answer, but the films ends with an explosive cut to black that left me staring at my own warped reflection for a few stunning moments. Even if I think I know what’s going to happen (and I do), there’s a terror in the question Seimetz begs in her film—and it’s not “What happened to them?”
It’s “What would you do if you knew you were going to die tomorrow?” I don’t know that I’m going to die tomorrow. (Not right now anyway. Gulp.) But the question is a terrifying mindworm for me all the same.
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