{"id":13654,"date":"2020-03-16T09:00:49","date_gmt":"2020-03-16T16:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=13654"},"modified":"2024-03-02T21:19:30","modified_gmt":"2024-03-03T05:19:30","slug":"this-is-not-a-sxsw-review-of-she-dies-tomorrow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/this-is-not-a-sxsw-review-of-she-dies-tomorrow\/","title":{"rendered":"This is Not a SXSW Review of ‘She Dies Tomorrow’"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

When you\u2019re in this line of work, you\u2019ll occasionally write a piece about how a film you\u2019ve just seen connects to The Events of The Day, and sometimes it\u2019s a bit of a stretch. And sometimes, the night before SXSW is cancelled because of the coronavirus, you go see a pre-festival screening of a movie about certain death, passed from one person to another via physical contact and shared paranoia. You don\u2019t exactly have to be Greil Marcus to draw the lines here, folks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The film in question is Amy Seimetz\u2019s She Dies Tomorrow<\/em>, which was slated to premiere last Saturday at the SXSW Film Festival. Once that festival (and thus that screening) was cancelled, the film\u2019s publicist informed those of us who had already seen it that we could run reviews starting Friday. It\u2019s hard to know what to do in a situation like that; while you want to acknowledge (and, in this case, praise) the work of the filmmakers, reviewing a film that literally no one can see, intended to run alongside an event that no longer exists, feels like a very \u201ctree falls in the woods\u201d proposition.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet here I am, not because I recommend the film \u2013 though I do, highly, though I\u2019m not sure what good a recommendation does when there\u2019s literally no way to see it? No, I wanted to at least share a few thoughts, because frankly, it\u2019s bizarre and a touch unnerving that what will most likely be my final press screening for quite some time was for\u2026 this particular film.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And to be clear, it\u2019s not just the aforementioned central premise, summarized on the film\u2019s IMDb page as \u201cAmy thinks she\u2019s dying tomorrow\u2026 and it\u2019s contagious\u201d \u2013 although that is certainly disconcerting. Amy is played by Kate Lyn Sheil, and no, it doesn\u2019t seem like a coincidence that she shares a given name with the film\u2019s writer\/director. It seems, initially, a story of depression and potential self-harm, and it\u2019s the kind of film that knows those feelings inside and out: how the mind fractures, how you\u2019ll fixate on one song, how nothing is more frightening than being left alone with one\u2019s own thoughts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This element has also gathered some unexpected cultural currency in the\u2026 week and half (Jesus, is that possible, that\u2019s all the time that\u2019s passed?) since our press screening. Amy doesn\u2019t leave her home because she can\u2019t, because her depression won\u2019t let her, so she rattles around among the half-unpacked boxes, despairing and crying, and I think we can all relate to that<\/em> at the moment. Hopefully not too much; She Dies Tomorrow<\/em> contains one of the bleakest images I\u2019ve seen in a movie recently, of a character swilling wine while browsing online for cremation urns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI. Am. Going. To. Die. Tomorrow,\u201d she tells Jane (Jane Adams), clearly the go-to friend in these scenarios, who responds as you\u2019re supposed to in a situation like that, with admonishments like \u201cDon\u2019t do anything you might regret.\u201d Jane only realizes that Amy\u2019s not threatening suicide, but explaining what she believes to be an inflexible certainty, when Jane begins to feel it too. And that section, as this feeling moves from Jane and then on to others, is the reason I absolutely cannot get She Dies Tomorrow<\/em> out of my head \u2013 because it\u2019s not about killing other people with your actions, but about passing along (in whatever way you might), a sense of fear, of doom, of certainty. Once you get an idea like that in your head, it\u2019s impossible to get out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t know when you\u2019ll get to see She Dies Tomorrow<\/em>, which came into SXSW seeking theatrical distribution; let\u2019s be honest, at this point, I\u2019m not sure when any of us are going to get to see much of anything. (Programming note: expect more reviews of VOD releases and retrospectives of things you can stream!) The entire theatrical distribution and exhibition thing<\/em> was already at a precarious bending point, an industry held aloft solely by giant event movies that moviegoers decided must<\/em> be seen on the big screen, and everything else could wait. Now all of those events are being kicked down the road, not that there might be theaters to play them in anyway; we could look back on this as the historical moment when that bend turned into a break.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But I hope you get to see it, and I hope you get to see it in a theater, for a number of reasons: to marvel at how Seimetz uses bursts of light, color, sound, and imagery to capture Amy\u2019s fractured mindstate; how the sound design fills the auditorium with downright apolcalyptic rumbles; how an audience of strangers will seek permission from each other to giggle at the horrifyingly dark comedy of its back half. (Like many of the bleakest movies, it\u2019s also very funny.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More than anything, I hope we\u2019re able to eventually hold it up as an artifact, a snapshot of a moment quite unlike any we\u2019ve seen. The films that best encapsulate their moment often do so altogether accidentally, and that\u2019s certainly the case here; the echoes of what was happening outside the theater door (and predictions of what would happen) are shocking, but unintended. Yet none of that blunts the picture\u2019s considerable force. And who knows, maybe one day we\u2019ll look back on it as a reminder of how quickly people can give in to despair, and how \u2013 for just the briefest of moments \u2013 we managed not to.\"\"\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When you\u2019re in this line of work, you\u2019ll occasionally write a piece about how a film you\u2019ve just seen connects […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":531,"featured_media":13655,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381,340],"tags":[1419,1098,162],"class_list":["post-13654","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","category-movie-reviews","tag-film-fests","tag-movie-review","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13654","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/531"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13654"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13654\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22881,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13654\/revisions\/22881"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13655"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13654"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13654"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13654"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}