Stream It Or Skip It: ‘She Dies Tomorrow’ on Hulu, an Extra-Existential Arthouse Horror Excursion

Add another one to the arthouse-horror library, as She Dies Tomorrow, the adventurous debut by filmmaker Amy Seimetz, now on Hulu after premiering on VOD in August of 2020. If there’s any backlash to this subgenre’s relatively recent prominence, it should be dragged to hell, because what do you want, more gimmicks and found-footage rubbish? Right. Now let’s see if this one stands out among the many followers of It Follows and Hereditary and The Witch.

SHE DIES TOMORROW: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: It’s official: Every current movie character that exists owns a turntable. It works nicely to visualize the haunting effect of Amy (Kate Lyn Sheil) playing the same operatic choral music repeatedly, picking up and dropping the needle over and over until the piece seeps into us at a cellular level, creeping the crap out of our mitochondria. She wanders her new, not-yet-unpacked house in a lost herself/lost her mind state of otherworldly existential ecstatic pain, drinking too much wine and shopping online for leather jackets and cremation urns. She sometimes gasps and collapses, overcome by ominously pulsing, colored lights, like it’s a mothership and the space aliens hypnotize their abductees with a disco of doom.

Jane (Jane Adams) stops by and finds Amy in her backyard in the darkness in a spangly dress smoking a cigarette, leaf blower blasting away. Amy shouldn’t be drinking. Amy insists she’s going to die tomorrow, and when she does, she wants Jane to turn her skin into a leather jacket. Flash back to a daytime moment, when Amy shows her recently purchased home to Craig (Kentucker Audley), and they lay on her bed and talk very intimately about regrets. Back to the night of foreboding doom, Jane returns home and heads to the basement, where she looks at cells under a microscope and apparently projects and paints them into evocative artworks. She should be at her shitty sister-in-law’s birthday party, but that’s the last thing she wants to do. She puts on the same f—ing choral piece and there’s a thump upstairs and the evil lights visit her too.

Cut to the shitty sister-in-law’s party. Jane walks in, still wearing her pajamas, and the shitty sister-in-law Susan (Katie Aselton) is shitty to her and won’t stop talking moronically about the unusual behavior of dolphins, and Jane’s brother Jason (Chris Messina) can only play both sides of this field. With disconcertingly wide-eyed insistence, Jane keeps saying she’s going to die tomorrow, so she’s caught it, whatever it is, and she’s Debbie Downering the shitty sister-in-law’s get-together, bumming out their other visitors Tilly and Brian (Jennifer Kim and Tunde Adebimpe). It won’t be long until all of them somehow just know they’re going to die tomorrow. And here is where I’d normally say NO SPOILERS, but I think this might be an unspoilable movie.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: She Dies Tomorrow is sort of like It Follows or Under the Skin if they were directed by David Lynch.

Performance Worth Watching: Sheil’s performance is unflinchingly, admirably raw. Sometimes you watch a horror film and praise someone for their physical endurance (hello, Alison Lohman in Drag Me to Hell), but this one is all about tapping an emotional torrent. Sheil isn’t quite Isabelle Adjani in Possession, but it’s in the same ballpark.

Memorable Dialogue: Might as well go with the line that’s repeated the most, by a variety of characters: “I’m going to die tomorrow.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Here is an impressionistic vagueness, Seimetz seems to say, now project your own anxieties and fears upon them! Well then, allow me: I noticed all the characters are middle-aged or approaching thereabouts, and I can confirm it’s a time where you start noticing the looming specter of death and realizing that if you double your age, you’re likely not going to reach that age, and you didn’t pay much attention to the halfway point, a revelation that’s like a slow opening of the dimmer switch. And as I sit with the windows open on a temperate summer day and hear classical music from a neighbor’s home, I swear it’s that same goddamn oratorio Amy played too many times, so something about the movie is functioning perhaps as intended: a seeping gloom that was intuitively crafted in some ways and outright calculated in others to make you a little, or maybe a lot, crazy.

Some have said and will say Seimetz was weirdly prescient, the movie functioning as a reflection of our current scrambled 2020 distanced and sequestered lives. (It was indeed filmed prior to the coronavirus outbreak, and originally slated for an SXSW debut.) That’s a valid interpretation of course, partly because She Dies Tomorrow could be about almost anything, for better or worse, for the contents of the creepy tree on Yoda’s planet are only what you take with you. But the COVID parallel is too easy, too on-the-nose, for as big as a global pandemic is, and as invisible as the virus is, Seimetz seems to be aiming even bigger, to address the even more invisible menace of mental illness perhaps, or even an abstract, universal emptiness, a great leveler of everything on a micro- and macrocosmic level. In the doom disco I hear the void yawning ambient and cold, and it’s so abstruse as to be almost funny, because it’s going to devour the shitty sister-in-law too, hopefully before she can air out more inanities about dolphin genitalia.

So the film engages in some otherworldly and effective corner-of-the-eye horror, although it’s metaphysical almost to a fault. Via the Amy character — whose name suggests an atom or three of autobiography — Seimetz taps so deeply into a well of emotional agony, she all but transcends the concepts of grief and anxiety, and the result, original and often extraordinary as it is, tends to be too ethereal. Seimetz doesn’t need to deliver a salivating monster of teeth, scales and claws to make the film memorable, but at the same time, She Dies Tomorrow isn’t quite gluey enough to be a movie you carry around in your bones.

Our Call: STREAM IT. She Dies Tomorrow is unsettling and ambitious, but errs a mite too far toward suggestiveness. If you’re itching for artsy scares, fire up Amulet before you watch this one.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Where to stream She Dies Tomorrow on VOD