Amy Seimetz Explores The Waking Nightmare of Mortality In ‘She Dies Tomorrow’

At the risk of stating the obvious, the first thing a scary movie needs is something for the audience to be afraid of. Amy Seimetz’s sophomore feature She Dies Tomorrow is indeed suffused with fear, operating at the fever pitch of terror attained only by someone who can feel their own proximity to danger or harm. But to classify this scariest of movies under the genre of horror would be entirely inadequate; Seimetz has attempted something more complex and penetrating, a creative endeavor that sounds Seinfeldian in nature yet much closer to experimental cinema in practice. She has succeeded in contriving a film about the sheer unadulterated terror of nothing. 

“The first step is acceptance,” Seimetz laughs over a Zoom chat with Decider from her home in California, which doubled as her set for a healthy chunk of production. “I had to give myself permission, to allow this to be an obtuse idea. Your instinct, when you’re writing something, is to explain, but I didn’t want to. I wanted it to remain about death — not cancer, not this, not that. Once I made my peace with the fact that it would be direct and visceral, then a lot of freedoms opened up in terms of visual expression… Once I was on the playground of this idea, the pure idea of death, we had much more possibility of sound and image. We could talk about near-death experiences, as opposed to this turning into a movie about a specific issue.”

Seimetz had hit something of an artistic lull, busying herself with TV jobs that earned her some fresh esteem as an actress and director (she helmed the coolly surreal Atlanta episodes at Drake’s house and the German culture festival, and scored a nice Hollywood payday for her appearance in the 2019 Pet Sematary remake) while leaving her antsy to set out for herself. Having grown a bit exasperated with the slow-turning wheels of small-screen production, she resolved to stop waiting around and get started, leaving the question of ‘on what?’ partially unanswered. “I had to make something,” she says, “in addition to having an idea I wanted to explore. I immediately called Jay Keitel the cinematographer and Kate Lyn Sheil and asked if they wanted to make a movie. They said yes, and that was the starting point. Only then did they ask if I had an idea, and all I could say was ‘kind of.'”

Using her own money to formulate a shoestring budget freed her to pursue a concept difficult to articulate even to her closest collaborators. (She recalls taking one meeting in which she tried to convey her premise to a studio suit fixated on finding a niche into which She Dies Tomorrow could be fitted. “I don’t like conversations like that,” Seimetz says.) 

Her best shot at verbalizing the gist of her new film still leaves much to the imagination. “We always knew what we were trying to get at in the abstract: inward to go outward. This sounds like a stoner idea, but we were thinking of the body as its own universe. Your brain processes that the same way it processes death, which is by questioning what’s real and what can be perceived. Death is something that’s endlessly baffling to me, because it does have to do with the body, with the heart stopping. It’s so simple and still incomprehensible. We can explain through medical reasoning, but in an existential sense, we don’t know why hearts stop, why death has to happen.”

The real question was how this psychologically amorphous pitch could be translated into physical, practical terms that a camera could capture. So, without further ado, here’s what this film is about in the most literal sense: the recovering alcoholic Amy (Kate Lyn Sheil) becomes inexplicably convinced that her life will end the next day, then passes this mental affliction to her friend Jane (Jane Adams) checking up on her, who passes it to her brother (Chris Messina) and his wife (Katie Aselton), who pass it to their dinner guests (Tunde Adebimpe and Jennifer Kim). Even that level of detail still leaves one unclear on how a filmmaker can communicate this intense interior state without manifesting it as something external.

We see Amy sauntering around her house in aimless circles, splaying herself on the wood-panel floor while listening to Mozart’s “Requiem” on repeat. She takes this building as the first in a series of inanimate objects to which she develops a profound connection, later taking up a leaf blower as a totem of domestic functionality, and eventually soothing herself by commissioning her corpse to be made into a leather jacket. Seimetz confesses that she drew on her own habits for the early scenes, looking back on the times in which she felt most unmoored. “I didn’t grow up with a ton of money and sort of assumed I’d never own an entire house, so I’d be sitting there looking at the woodgrain and vowing to memorize the pattern on every single plank because I loved them,” she says. “Then I’d wonder if I really did love them, or was just trying to make myself feel something.”

If nothing else — though there is plenty else — her film abounds with feeling, and in every direction. Every character touched by this contagion of thought undergoes an emotional gauntlet leading them to newfound honesty or remorse or self-understanding. For a film about the waking nightmare of mortality, it’s also disarmingly humorous, in the way that “the first joke someone makes after leaving a funeral will always be hilarious,” as Seimetz puts it. There’s a desperation for relief in grim times, and her film includes dashes of comedy as a depressurizing agent. “I don’t find death funny, but I do think it’s a cruel joke played on all existence,” she says. “I like poking fun at myself, because it helps me cope with my existential dread or just to indulge in how I’m feeling. I can laugh at myself and take myself out of it.”

That existential dread, however, hangs thick over each scene all the same. Seimetz employed eerie formal techniques to simulate the sensation that something urgent yet unidentifiable is wrong, a stomach-churning unease intimately familiar to the anxious and depressed. When the death-inkling spikes, the coloration of the photographic exposures goes haywire, layering red-blue-yellow-green versions of a character over themselves as the score approximates a brain going through a paper shredder. Like her previous feature effort, 2012’s little-seen Sun Don’t Shine, She Dies Tomorrow begins with an abrupt, jarring shot of a woman gasping for breath. “I wanted to make a connection between the two without being too up-my-own-ass about it,” she says. “They’re both about death, but Sun Don’t Shine is about denial of the inevitable where She Dies Tomorrow is about the trying to accept the inevitable.”

Again, Seimetz speaks in non-concrete language, preferring to contend with ‘the inevitable’ as a thing unto itself rather than a force taking shape. Her characters do the same, coping with a happening that can’t be seen or touched even as it touches them. We all create intangible things for ourselves to panic about, and must then process that that self-creation doesn’t make that panic any less meaningful or true. This is the basis of every film passing itself off under the label of “psychological thriller,” but Seimetz sets herself apart by letting the nothingness sit with the weight of a boulder, a nameless non-presence still heavy enough to crush any of us. There’s no phrase for this, the negative space between “nothing is scarier than death” and “the only thing scarier than death is nothing.” Seimetz, for all her insights into her own work, realizes that the deepest Zen enlightenment comes from embracing this unplaceable un-ness.

“It was my attempt to touch this thing that I don’t necessarily know how to put into words,” she chuckles. “Even now, doing all these interviews.”

Charles Bramesco (@intothecrevassse) is a film and television critic living in Brooklyn. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Nylon, Vulture, The A.V. Club, Vox, and plenty of other semi-reputable publications. His favorite film is Boogie Nights.

Where to stream She Dies Tomorrow on Demand