Dir. Amy Seimetz. 86 minutes.
3.5/5
What would “Halloween” be without Michael Myers, or “Friday the 13th” without Jason and Pamela Voorhees? “She Dies Tomorrow” offers a possible answer. Amy (Kate Lyn Sheil), a recovering alcoholic, becomes convinced that she will die tomorrow, and promptly begins browsing Amazon for funeral urns. Amy’s friends are, at first, impatient with her morbid complaints, until they find that her irrational, but absolute, fear of imminent death is contagious.
Lit with pulsating neon blues and pinks reminiscent of Nicolas Winding Refn or Dario Argento, “She Dies Tomorrow” is a genuinely unusual horror movie. Most of us manage to ignore the reality of death almost all of the time — but what if we suddenly found it unignorable? Maybe, like the characters of “She Dies Tomorrow,” we’d descend into self-obsessed meltdowns, rush to spend time with our families or quit our jobs to go off-roading.
In one scene, Amy interrupts a friend’s birthday party — right in the middle of the birthday song, no less — to loudly announce that she’s going to die. Here, and elsewhere, “She Dies Tomorrow” offers loopy moments that ride the line between cringe-comedy and horror. Perhaps this is the birth of the “cringe-horror” movie. And, if the coronavirus pandemic has returned an unsettling awareness of the possibility of death to everyday life, perhaps “She Dies Tomorrow” offers the right horror for the moment.
