Review: Few pandemic films can adjust to the hypnotic force of Amy Seimetz’s ‘She Dies Tomorrow’

Psychological horror film that behaves like an absurd comedy (and vice versa), “She dies tomorrow” rightly begins with a crisis that may be mistaken, at first, by a relapse. Amy (Kate Lyn Sheil), a recovering alcoholic, wakes up with a sudden premonition of disaster. She wanders around the empty rooms of her newly purchased los Angeles home, sipping a glass of wine. Listen to Mozart’s Requiem and buy an urn online, possibly for her. In the end, call a friend, who hears a familiar depressive note in her voice and goes into intervention mode: “Don’t do anything you can regret,” she says. “Go for a walk. Or why don’t you go see a movie?”

“A movie lasts an hour and a half” is Amy’s stupid answer, and that’s the time she doesn’t have to waste. “She Dies Tomorrow”, meanwhile, is not intended to waste yours. Written and directed through actress and filmmaker Amy Seimetz, this extraordinarily fun film lasts 85 minutes, although the cloud of moods, anxieties and concepts leaves it takes longer to dissipate. The brevity of his story and the elasticity of his subjects depend on his specific power: operating within narrow narrative and budgetary boundaries, Seimetz seeks to reshape our perceptions, replace our sense of how films can constitute the unconstitutional.

When the aforementioned friend, Jane Adams, stops for a visit, Amy announces the bad news that haunted her from the first scenes: “I’m going to die tomorrow.” His cursed and inexplicable fatalism temporarily sends Jane to the door, but Amy has unknowingly planted a seed. By the time Jane installs a small collection at the home of her brother Jason (Chris Messina) and sister-in-law Susan (Katie Aselton), she is convinced that she will also die tomorrow, a trust that temporarily sweeps through the film and infects the other characters we find as, finally, a virus.

Too much in the nose? Perhaps, however, Seimetz’s film comes in its right relevance, that is, absolutely by accident. In the midst of the inevitable attack of pandemic-themed films and TV shows that will take up position in the months and years to come, none will succeed in prescience of it, and only a few can fit into their nauseating and ambiguous strength. Originally scheduled for the March premiere at the South to Southwest Film Festival, one of the first major public occasions to cancel due to the new coronavirus, “She Dies Tomorrow” tells the story of some other type of pandemic: a psychic contagion. It is about the force of suggestion, how something so intangible but unwavering as concern can spread and take root deep in human consciousness.

Is death on the horizon for Amy, Jane and their friends? The film refuses to say. Seimetz is no exception to the conventions of film terror; there are some photographs of damaged blood and crystals, plus a sinister lynchian buzz on the soundtrack. But she is less interested in the visceral probabilities of her vanity than in her theoretical and existential implications. The consultation of what happens is less vital than how their characters are affected, especially Amy and Jane. (The close-up of two heroines, one of which may fit the name, is just one of the film’s stealthy tributes to Lars von Trier’s “Melancholia.”

Shortly before succumbing to contagion, Susan will escape herself in a drunken fog: “We are all the same!” This line would possibly come out of nowhere; in fact, it follows a difference in the mating behavior of dolphins, but it is also a widely accepted theory of human behavior, a theory that “She Dies Tomorrow” takes seriously enough to protect and challenge. Our reaction to a crisis, genuine or perceived, is one of the qualities that make us human. And Seimetz, combining suspense and panic conventions and rigorous observations of the characters, measures this reaction in terms that are sympathetic and damning.

For two of the party’s visitors (played by Jennifer Kim and Tunde Adebimpe), realizing that death is imminent is strangely liberating. Social subtleties are slowly disintegrating; the decisions they had been delaying for weeks were made without hesitation. In particular, no one here panics or falls into the histrionic. Some tears flow, but most of the time they all get frozen, defeated, emotionally immobilized. The characters seem to be compartmentalized to each other, not only through their faltering discussion and faltering eye contact, but also through the same spaces in which they move: blank, cleared rooms in a night Los Angeles that has rarely seemed calmer or strangely depopulated. .

A curious concept arises: what if, if, if disintegrating in the face of the apocalypse, most of us, at least those of us who have the privilege of practicing this apocalypse from the relative safety of our homes, chose not to combat risk or assistance? others, even to retreat further to our own isolation? What if complacency took hold of her, because giving a full voice and screaming at our inner confusion was too terrible and exhausting to endure?

On the one hand, it turns out that Susan’s theory has been shown in a daunting way: we are all the same. But on the other hand, we couldn’t be more different. “She Dies Tomorrow” is nothing yet a birthday party of individual eccentricity, nothing that it achieves through the shattered novelty of its form and the distinctive character of its main actors.

Sheil, whose dry wit and chiselled reflexes have been a staple of American independent cinema over the past decade (including Seimetz’s first feature film, “Sun Don’t Shine,” alludes to the personal pains that her near disappearance brought to the surface. Her journey, which takes her to key moments away from Los Angeles and the surrounding desert, and in flashbacks to happier moments with her boyfriend (Kentucker Audley), is captured in wide, unconventional shots and intense close-ups. Whatever our point of view. , recommend these photographs (they were taken through cinematographer Jay Keitel), his delight remains necessarily unknowable.

It’s true, to some extent, of Jane and all the other characters we know. But if Seimetz had possibly given Amy her name, you’re wondering if she’s given Jane more sensitivity. Jane is a walking rarity; spend most of the film in floral-printed pajamas (a suitable death suit counts more for some than others), and the formidable Adams laughs with the character’s ruthless gestures.

But Jane is also an artist, a summary bureaucracy painter who is encouraged in components through dark-colored ingredients she observes under the microscope. Seimetz is also an artist, located in an exciting way between the independent strip and the advertising current. (Writer, director, actress and producer, she is one of the main artistic forces of the television series “The Girlfriend Experience” and has recently given the impression in the major horror films “Alien: Covenant” and “Pet Sematary”).

And when Seimetz looks through his own lens, what do you see? We make a sure sense of the captivating leaps of “She Dies Tomorrow” in visual and audible abstraction. At key intervals, the film uses soft blue and bright red strobe light effects and increases the volume of the Mondo Boys’ intensely lyrical score, surreal interludes that can articulate a point of terror, horror and imaginable worry that exceeds the talents of the character. Fast. In those unexpected and moving moments, Seimetz turns out to speak for them and perhaps more than we should admit, for us.

On Wednesday, a Seattle City Council majority rejected a proposal to cut the police department’s remaining 2020 budget by 50%. The budget committee vote, which came a day after the city’s mayor and police leader held a press convention to criticize the proposal, marked progress for Black Lives Matter and the police brutality advocates that led U.S. departments to withdraw funds. and reallocate the budget to network services, adding housing and youth programs. The budget relief plan, proposed through Councilman Kshama Sawant, would have cut $54 million from the Seattle Police Department through layoffs and reassigned them to programs, adding $34 million for affordable housing.

Joe Biden said Senator Kamala Harris is “too in the race” to be his running mate in the 2020 Democratic candidacy, and said he didn’t blame California lawmakers for attacking him in a first number one debate. The conciliatory tone of the alleged Democratic nominee towards Harris comes after senior members of Biden’s audit team threw bloodless water on his candidacy for the vice presidency in biden’s final phase of studies. Last July, POLICYo reported that former healer Chris Dodd, part of biden’s vice-president’s study committee, told a longtime Biden supporter that Harris “had no regrets” when asked about his confrontation with Biden at the first number one Democratic debate.

The Baltimore Department of Recreation and Parks is investigating the removal of artworks that support the Black Lives Matter movement. The five artworks were created through a variety of artists who had obtained city approval, the Baltimore Sun reported for the first time. The Baltimore Department of Recreation and Parks is investigating the fact that park rangers got rid of the Work Of Art Black Lives Matter that had been approved and legal in the city, the Baltimore Sun first reported.

Four former Census Bureau administrators say it’s a serious mistake to count efforts. The Census Bureau said last week that it would avoid the user count on September 30, a month before the scheduled October 31 deadline. The move left census officials concerned that a “massive under-count” is imminent.

China threatened Thursday to take countermeasures on a vacation to Taiwan through U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar, as the island claimed through China ready for its highest-level official scale in the United States in 4 decades. The scale, which begins on Sunday, adds to the tensions between Beijing and Washington over everything from industry and human rights to the pandemic of the new coronavirus. China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said at a daily briefing in Beijing that any attempt to deny or challenge the “one China” principle, which states that Taiwan is a component of China, will fail.

At least one user in the United States has died every 80 seconds on average in the more than seven days, according to a new study, while President Donald Trump said the death toll in the country “is what it is” in a recent interview. The grim numbers were first reported through NBC News on Wednesday, which noted that his own recount revealed that another 7,486 people had died in the last seven days from covid-19. While the mortality rate was a little slower in July, with an American dying every 102 seconds on average per month, the most recent figures seemed to show an acceleration in pace, as NBC News reported.

Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, has revitalized his Hindu base after placing the basestone for a new debatable temple on a disputed site among Muslims. In November, after a decades-long legal battle, India’s highest court ruled that a temple could be built in the city of Ayodhya, where a mosque was located until it was destroyed by Hindu mobs in 1992. Modi has turned his structure into a key compromise as a component of his Hindu nationalist campaign, which saw him re-elected with a crushing victory last year.

A month before the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, killing some 150,000 more people in Hiroshima and 75,000 in Nagasaki, some of the most sensitive scientists at Project Manhattan tried to beg President Harry S. Truman to call off the bombing. Finally, an assistant sealed two “secret” clinical petitions before they arrived at the president’s office, and were stored until they were declassified in 1958. The atomic bombs were dropped on August 6 and 9, 1945, crushing Hiroshima and Nagasaki and surprising the Japanese. cursed in submission.

After the murder of George Floyd last May, prosecutors say, an unarmed black man was murdered by a white Minneapolis police officer, nationwide protests and protests sparked emotions in the military, even the Pentagon chief. Defense Secretary Mark Esper said Wednesday that the timing was a wake-up call not only for the United States, but also for himself, and had shaped his recent efforts around diversity and inclusion in the Department of Defense. “I don’t think what everyone appreciated, at least myself, is the intensity of feeling among our members of color, especially black Americans, about the murder of George Floyd, and the other incidents that preceded and happened him. them and what they lived in the ranks as well,” Esper said in a virtual appearance at the Aspen Security Forum.

More than 200 Minneapolis police officers initiated the permanent disability application procedure after the George Floyd riots; Mike Tobin reports.

On Wednesday, Facebook despite it all took the long-awaited step of cutting off from its platform a detail of the content of Trump’s crusade that was causing incorrect information about COVID-19. The question arose during the president’s appearance on Fox and Friends that morning, where he falsely stated, “If you look at young people, young people are almost, and I would almost nevertheless say, almost immune to this disease.” Of course, there is a debate about whether Facebook and Twitter deserve to be arbiters of the facts and make a decision about what is done and fiction,” Fox presenter Sandra Smith began before sharing genuine facts about showed cases of coronavirus in youth.

Portland, Oregon police chief Chuck Lovell called on violent protesters to stop their movements at a news convention Wednesday. While protests in downtown Portland have not been violent since the presence of federal agents last week, there have been violent protests in other parts of the city. Wednesday marked the 70th consecutive day of protests in the city, which began after George Floyd’s death last May.

For the editor: It’s hard to see Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris as California facing hypotheses about whether Joe Biden will decide on her as a vice presidential candidate. The malicious device that works to re-elect President Trump will have a day on the court with this. If Harris considers being vice president as she holds her current position, Biden will struggle to locate her in the city because she will campaign for her work.

The company welcomes banks and credentials in their product diversity from today. Originally gave the impression in Architectural Digest

Most black Americans say they need police to continue their current presence in local domains, even as protests against racism and police brutality spread across the country and calls for reform and even the dismantling of police persist. Nearly two-thirds, or 61%, of black Americans said they were looking for the police presence in their domain to remain the same, while 20 percent said they would like to see police spend more time in their neighborhood, according to a new Gallup poll. . Another 19% said they would like to see a minimal police presence in their domain.

The toughest weapon ever used in opposition to other humans was fired across the United States in Japan 75 years ago. On August 6, 1945, a B-29 bomber known as Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, marking the first of two wartime bomb uses. The city razed: Less than 10% of Hiroshima’s buildings were not destroyed by the bomb, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *