MIFF Session 8: SHE DIES TOMORROW

Amy is convinced she will die the next day. After an opening scene in which she is farewelling a character we don't see (unless it's the guy we see through a doorway who appears to be ranting) she returns to her house, puts the Lachrimosa from Mozart's Requiem on loop (well, it's vinyl so she just keeps putting it back to the start of the track) and does stuff while getting progressively drunk. She tries calling a friend who doesn't seem to hear her that well but says that she'll ignore her family commitments and come and visit Amy. Amy gives up on the call and keeps doing stuff.

Jan does turn up, lets herself in and talks Amy down from a wall (not suicidally high). Amy tells Jane about dying the next day. Jane observes Amy's falling off the wagon and cautions her against rash decisions but Amy isn't talking about taking her own life. Then what? She's just convinced she has less than a day to live. Assured that Amy is essentially fine, Jane leaves and goes to her sister in law's birthday drinks, interrupting a bizarre conversation about dolphin sex (which the other two guests are not comfortable with) with her own conviction that she, too, will die tomorrow. She's already tried to call Amy with this but got no answer. It got into her head and it won't leave. Eventually she does, going back to her strange home studio. We hear a conversation between the two guests who have also caught the thought and then back at the brother's house the couple both get infected. They go to their daughter's room and cuddle paternally.

The spread of the thought is then assumed to make its way throughout the city. Jane, wandering aimlessly, later comes upon two young women who are having a stunned but quite happy conversation about it. And then at one point we see the end of the chain that brought it to Amy and, while it answers no further question than that we understand that it is an ongoing malaise.

This feels less like a simple outbreak of meditations on mortality than an epidemic of existentialism. It bears the same message to everyone it touches but they respond differently. Against this the baubles of the old normal as activities, possessions and the trappings of reproduction and nesting are on display in a presentation that swings from video-verite to purple psychedelia. Once the nagging bug of an idea gets in everyone is changed, regardless of whether they will die or not, bodily or not.

Kate Lynn Sheil redeems herself from the winceable mess that was Kate Plays Christine and provides a strong central or starting figure of sliding chaos that will envelope the rest of the cast. The ever welcome Jane Adams brings her dependable convicted fragility to Jane. The scene with the doctor that morphs into a sex scene but doesn't is powered by her wonder, eagerness and barely concealed disappointment. Tunde Adebimpe whose role becomes more profound that we might expect shows us great subtlety in his polite uninterest in the party conversation which expands into the strong but quiet conviction in the subsequent conversation.

She Dies Tomorrow flirts with a kind of indy mumblecore drama but refuses to give in to it. There is pretty much nothing cute about it (which immediately tears it from those conventions) but there are stretches of warmth and authentic concern. I almost gasped to see the main production credit go to Benson and Morehead, a team whose films as writers and directors have built a growing cosmic horror realm including the adjacent After Midnight/Something Else (2018). This film bears little of their stamp but rather doesn't disagree with their branded Lovecraftoverse. It would be an apt entry into a B&M marathon. On its own, it stands as a creditable absurdist what-if. Points!