“I was thinking I could be made into a leather jacket,” Amy (Kate Lyn Sheil) muses to her concerned friend, Jane (Jane Adams), not long into the moody psychodrama “She Dies Tomorrow.” Having flatly communicated her belief that she will bite the dust the next day, Amy is determined that her corpse be useful.
The scene suggests black comedy, but this second feature from the writer and director Amy Seimetz (after the marvelous “Sun Don’t Shine” in 2013) won’t make you feel much like laughing. At once a fascinating experiment and a claustrophobic puzzle, “She Dies Tomorrow” could be about many things or nothing at all, its free-floating mood of anxious anticipation ready to be slotted into multiple neuroses. Amy isn’t suicidal: A recovering alcoholic who has mysteriously relapsed — elliptical memories suggest a painful breakup or a major regret could be the cause — she wanders around her recently purchased house, stroking walls and caressing hardwood floors, her unpacked belongings emphasizing the emptiness.
Late in the night, strobing colors and a weird, urgent wail pull the trancelike Amy toward the audience before we float off to rejoin Jane, who’s unable to concentrate on the blood sample she’s examining through a microscope. (Flowing blood is a recurring motif in the film, as if its characters’ irrationalities had a biological explanation.) In time, wearing only her pajamas, Jane will show up at her brother and sister-in-law’s party and she too will announce, in front of their astonished guests, that she’s going to die the following day.
Dazed but far from confused, “She Dies Tomorrow” tugs at you, nagging to be viewed more than once. Eerie and at times impenetrable, the movie (which was completed pre-pandemic) presents a rapidly spreading psychological contagion that feels uncomfortably timely. Its echoing rooms and deserted porches, glazed expressions and pale, sterile colors are — thanks in large part to the cinematographer Jay Keitel — adamantly unsettling. At the same time, its repetitive images and dialogue can seem silly and frustrating. Characters awaken more than once with a terrifying, sucking gasp, and I lost count of the number of times people state variations of “I’m going to die tomorrow.”
Though not strictly a horror movie, “She Dies Tomorrow” sees Seimetz’s vision build to a horrifying pointlessness. There are wounds, and there are bodies; but they feel as inconsequential as the characters’ fancy light fixtures and other accouterments of middle-class life. More than anything, perhaps, the film concentrates the mind on end-of-life options: Faced with an imminent expiration date, would you, like one character, unplug a terminally ill parent, or, like another, simply feel relieved that you can now get out of an unsatisfactory relationship? Or would you, like Amy, be happy just to be made into a leather jacket?
She Dies Tomorrow
Rated R for a little blood and a great deal of angst. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. Rent or buy on iTunes, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators.
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