She Dies Tomorrow

Some Time To Die

She Dies Tomorrow
USA 2020
Directed by Amy Seimetz
Blue Finch Films

Warning: This film has been called spoiler proof by angry reviewers, it seems to me but, I think it’s fair to say this review has light spoilers.

Okay, I’ll say up front that I have mixed feelings about She Dies Tomorrow. I sought it out on a recommendation from someone and so it does have its fans but, it seems there’s a heck of a lot of negative criticism for this film too and I can kinda see why. That being said there’s very little in the film not to like, except for the lack of clarity on the central premise... but it’s a great hook.

We start off with a character called Amy (played by Kate Lyn Sheil from the great Brigsby Bear, reviewed here). Clearly something is wrong with her and then we flash to someone who we later find out was in a relationship with her... he is in a room and starts going mad thinking he’s going to die tomorrow. Then Amy wakes up from a nightmare and returns to her empty house. She rings a friend because she’s anxious... she keeps stopping and starting as a realisation hits her every now and again. At some point the title of the movie is suddenly flashed on the screen for two seconds, blaring music like a jump scare... and then we continue to watch Amy slowly becoming disjointed from reality. Is a sequence showing blood cells interacting, a hint that she has a virus? She starts exploring textures with her sense of touch and looking at things... caressing flat surfaces as something which sounded a bit like Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater (it’s probably not but that’s what it reminded me of) plays over and over on her vinyl record turntable. 

Her friend Jane (played by Jane Adams) comes and Amy tells her the thing which has been bothering her. She knows for a fact that she is going to die tomorrow... or at least she believes she will. Jane thinks she is having an alcoholic relapse (which technically she also is because, she’s drinking like there’s no tomorrow... because she believes that’s the case) and goes off. However, when we follow Jane home, she also gets the same idea that she, herself, is going to die tomorrow.

While Amy checks out the best cremation urns on the internet and decides she wants to be turned into a leather jacket after she dies, we follow the ‘also coming unhinged’ as she crashes her brother’s wife’s small birthday party... and tells them she’s going to die. Not long after she leaves them, the four people there also believe they will die the next day. 

And so it goes as we follow, primarily, Amy and Jane (and a few others but to a lesser degree) as they go about the evening contemplating their existence and getting into encounters with people they also infect with.... I dunno... an idea. 

At some point, the flashbacks from Amy’s very recent past, which eventually dovetails back into the start of the movie, show us how she came to be ‘infected’ but doesn’t show how the chain starts and, I’m sad to say, doesn’t clue us in to what’s happening. Now, that might have been okay... like a good zombie movie, the cause of the effect is rarely discussed but, in this case, there’s no actual pay off either and I think that’s why people may be having a problem with it (at least, some of the appalling reviews I’ve read). I also normally don’t mind when a movie doesn’t have a traditional closure moment but, frankly, with a mystery concept and leaving us with no idea if any of the people in this do, actually, die tomorrow... it feels a little off.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I appreciate the fact that this film is basically taking an idea... if you think about it, it’s very much an M. R. James pass the curse story variation on Casting The Runes, found in such as movies like Ringu, Drag Me To Hell and It Follows (except there’s no getting rid of it so it’s a little more like a virus in some ways)... and then exploring the responses and reactions of the people who have been hit by this growing pandemic of certainty that they are going to meet their own demise the next day. And, yeah, I do appreciate the emotional areas into which this film strays and the way in which it explores humanity’s reaction to the prospect of its near demise... but the hook could have had just a little more back up to it, I felt. 

That being said, the director has an eye for interesting visuals. So some nice shot compositions where, for instance, Amy is framed by an upright rectangle formed by an alcove-like space into another room. And she certainly demonstrates that she’s into textures as much as her namesake protagonist, sometimes using big, vertical solid blocks to split the frame. And there’s also a lot of bright, flashing colour in certain sequences too... during episodes when the ‘victims’ lives are invaded by sudden spurts of enveloping lighting like they just strayed into a David Lynch nightmare and then are suddenly hit by distorted, indecipherable voices in the background (we know from one character that she’s hearing the voices of people long dead in her life)... so, yeah, visually the film is an absolute treat.

And so is the acting. Everyone is great in this and it feels like one of those films where certain things might have been left unscripted and worked on with the actors to build up their characters and scenes. Possibly not but, if this was strictly following the script then that would be a surprise to me, for sure. I suspect there was a lot of improvisation on the film.

So... I got a lot out of the film for sure but Tomorrow She Dies is not something I would recommend to many people (if any) because it sets up and executes such an intriguing prospect... I even thought we were heading into Philip K. Dick ‘reality is not what it seems’ territory at one point... but fails to deliver any hint or clue as to what is really going on. Like the ground zero moment for this ‘infection’ and I get the feeling that this concept must have been explored by the writer but then maybe just deliberately pared back for the audience and it just didn’t quite make it for me. It felt just a little bit thrown away and so, while I appreciated the way the concept was explored and the ideas it threw up as a consequence, I don’t think this is one I’d watch again.

Upstream Colour

The Pig Sleep

Upstream Colour
2013 USA
Directed by Shane Carruth
Metrodome Blu Ray Zone B 

Sort of Warning: This review may or may not contain spoilers... probably not because I suspect everyone is going to have their own interpretation and relation to the events that take place on screen... but still, putting this warning here just in case.

Upstream Colour is the second feature directed by Shane Carruth, who also writes, produces, does the cinematography, co-edits, stars in and composes the soundtrack for the film. Like his absolutely brilliant first movie Primer, it takes a science fiction base but grounds it absolutely in a very matter-of-fact contemporary setting, exploring a very basic premise but in the most clever, non-linear and almost impenetrable way.

The editing choices in this movie allow for some almost random placements which don’t adhere to a strictly linear presentation of the narrative (if you’re happy to call it a narrative) and which is best received by an audience member as a jumble of puzzle pieces which are there to decode but which will not necessarily lead to an ultimate rendering of a specifically correct conclusion. So while Primer shares a certain style and atmosphere with this movie, the place the content leads you to in this one is more along the lines of something like, for instance, Ben Wheatley’s brilliant Kill List (reviewed here), in terms of it not taking where you think the destination might be or, if you did get there first, taking you there for no specific reason.

However, I think in the case of Kill List, the clues and provocative moments are deliberately inserted to lead you to a place which has no real solution to it (and if I’m wrong about that, please tell me so) whereas I’m pretty sure this film has a very specific linear narrative hiding behind the frames, as it were, and which still holds up solidly, no matter what the common or popular interpretation of it is. For instance, I didn’t feel I was totally getting it so I read a synopsis of the film on Wikipedia afterwards and I have to say that, after reading that quite detailed synopsis... I ended up thinking, “Hey, they didn’t get it.” Like in the case where a dream sequence is mentioned to explain the presence of a specific character (played in the most passively haunting but somehow sinister way by Andrew Sensenig) who can be quite often seen watching other characters in the movie. I don’t think these were supposed to be dream sequences at all, to be honest. More like visual metaphors to define the presence of a person watching his pigs/experiments... if that makes any sense and, unless you’ve seen the movie, it almost certainly won’t.

Here’s what I could piece together.

A woman’s life is completely destroyed by a man who uses a specific kind of maggot, which he hides in a pill capsule and gives her as drugs. It has already been demonstrated that the maggot can form a very strong bond between minds which even allows two people to synchronise their movements via their thoughts. This maggot gets into Amy Seimetz character Kris and, once it’s in her system, the man has total hypnotic dominance over her mind. In the aftermath of her lengthy encounter as his slave, for all intents and purposes, she is left without money, a job and brutally scarred from when she was trying to get the maggot out of herself. In the middle of this all she is lured to a man to remove them who actually pulls it from her body and implants it into a pig. She then forgets everything and has to rebuild her ruined life with no knowledge of how she got like this.

A year later, Kris meets a man who seems to share a common empathy, even though they seem to have no interest in each other initially. The man is called Jeff and is played by Shane Carruth. As their relationship develops, certain things slowly come to light, as much as the editing style and placement of the narrative allows it to do so in your mind, and it becomes very clear that Kris is not the only person who has been through this devastating experience. What’s more, Jeff is also a victim of this process and it appears that maybe this is why the two of them seem so dependent on each other... something that gets more acute as they begin to share the same thoughts, emotions, physical feelings and even perceive childhood anecdotes of each other as their own. Things come to a head and, with the help of their shared identity with various pigs, orchids (I think, don’t ask) and the published musical compositions/sound scapes of the pig man, they end up taking their personal thread, joining it up with many other individuals (who presuambly form a connective identity), and basically take over the pig farming business by giving them a much better life.

If that sounds kinda skewed and unlikely then... yeah, it probably is. That’s my interpretation of the movie at my level (it’s true, I may be stupid) and I suspect everyone is going to come up with something different. Is the pig farmer genuinely observing the plight of the various victims of the process started by the man with the maggots, for instance? I don’t know but I’m willing to assume he’s tapping into their heads somehow and maybe shares a link from the same process as them... maybe that’s how Kris comes to get the upper hand near the end of the film and, in some ways, take over the process while bringing an end to the potential ruin and devastation of people’s lives.

What I can tell you for sure is that Upstream Colour is absolutely gripping throughout, just like Primer was, and it seems to me to be artistically successful in all that it tries to do. The performances are electrical and about as naturalistic as you can imagine. The cinematography is superb, giving us drab and neutral tones pitched against some beautiful, almost luminous colouring for certain sequences. The editing is both easy to follow... even if it does feel like Nicholas Roeg on acid, but without the fanfare... and that editing serves to provoke an atmosphere of puzzle solving which leads to your full engagement with the material on offer. The soundtrack, while a little clichéd, perhaps, for a film of this nature, serves the onslaught of images very well and never once outstays its welcome.

If I’d have seen this film at a cinema last year as I’d wanted to (Seriously UK film distributors... what happened to it? It didn’t play in my local Cineworld once!) then it would easily have made my top five movies from last year. As it happens, I’ll have to be content with saying that this movie is a very definite and hard recommend from me. Shane Carruth is an artistic force to be reckoned with (he’s even pretty watchable as an actor, as it happens) and this movie is a great work of art all lovers of cinema should see at least once in their lives. Very much a blu-ray I suspect I’ll be lending to a lot of people who wouldn’t normally see a movie like this and it’ll likely get a return visit from me sometime in the near future too. Take a look when you get the chance.