I Would Like to See It: She Dies Tomorrow

At first blush, She Dies Tomorrow feels like the kind of deadpan social thriller we’ve seen so much of over the past decade. Think Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster or Riley Stearns’ The Art of Self-Defense — flat line deliveries mapping the absurdities of modern existence and mortality as the lives of faintly ridiculous characters spin out of control. Certainly it shares some of its DNA with these antecedents, its central animating idea is thornier and more compelling than simple social observation. The crushing and contagious anxiety of life on the brink of apocalypse slithers through scenes of tepid suburban merrymaking and dysfunction. Vacations, dune buggy joyrides, wine-soaked birthday parties where unhappy couples exchange jokes and veiled barbs; it’s all a sideshow to the inexorable specter of climate collapse and water shortages and global war and plague and every other shadow under which even the most blithely comfortable Americans live.

The film opens with relapsed alcoholic Amy (Kate Lyn Sheil) listening to Mozart’s Lacrimosa over and over again in her newly-purchased house, a possession which like all the rest She Dies Tomorrow features fails to impart comfort or joy to its owner. Think of hateful, acid-tongued suburban housewife Susan (Katie Aselton) opening her birthday presents while waiting for death to take her, the contents of the bags and boxes never revealed. Think of the bland decor of her house and of Amy’s, the bare walls and minimalist furniture, the empty kitchens and sterile relationships. None of middle class success’s classic signifiers can save these people from their own sourceless, overwhelming despair, their infectious conviction that they will, as the title declares, die tomorrow. Even the desperate violence both onscreen and implied does nothing to assuage their crushing misery.

She Dies Tomorrow’s principal flaw is that it gives its cast little to do. Jane Adams does impressive work as the eccentric and paranoid microbiological photographer Jane, but outside her wide-eyed tremulousness there’s little to distinguish the rest of the characters. Sheil, who did some of the best acting of the last decade in Seimetz’s previous film Sun Don’t Shine, is here confined to apathetic silence, her formidable talents as a physical actor sidelined in favor of focus on a wider cast of equally flat characters. There’s plenty to recommend the film, and its central conceit is wielded cleverly and to considerable effect, but its wasted potential burdens even its best scenes.