Is She Dies Tomorrow the ultimate Covid-19 film?
Amy Seimetz first became transfixed by death as a child. The American actor and director, whose indie film She Dies Tomorrow is being vaunted as the ultimate “Covid movie”, was a latchkey child who spent weekends bingeing on age-inappropriate horror films at her divorced father’s house in Florida.
In She Dies Tomorrow, Seimetz’s second feature, a recovering alcoholic also called Amy is seized by the certainty that she will die the next day. Gradually, everyone in Amy’s elite social circle is gripped by the same conviction: that they, too, have just hours to live. It doesn’t take a genius to work out why the film’s exploration of viral psychic dread feels eerily apposite in the age of Covid-19.
Seimetz, 38, doesn’t think we talk enough about death. “When I go to parties, I sometimes wonder why we’re chit-chatting,” she tells me with a laugh on Zoom. “I’m always like, ‘Why aren’t we talking about something that’s really important?’” She accepts the charge that she’s “a buzzkill” (or was, when parties were a thing). “I’m either dancing,” she says, “or killing conversation with awkward topics”.
Her first film, the critically-acclaimed Sun Don’t Shine, was similarly morbid; it tracked a miserable couple’s drive across Florida with a rotting corpse in the boot of their car. She Dies Tomorrow is more nakedly autobiographical, and arose partly from Seimetz’s wish to make creative use of the “existential dread” that has dogged her for decades.
Its examination of the virality of anxiety is also informed by her experience of Trump’s America, in which she has seen “the 24-hour news cycle take hold”. For Seimetz, today’s breakneck news ecosystem, which she has tried to wean herself off, is energised by an underlying “fear of death, and a denial of death”. With She Dies Tomorrow, she wanted to “rip away the artifice” and look squarely at death itself: what it is, what happens after, how people grapple with such a “slippery” inevitability.
One scene shows the heroine Amy scrolling online for urns and leather jackets – she has decided that she wants her corpse to be turned into a coat. The scene articulates Seimetz’s belief that we should confront the pragmatics of death rather than wait until it’s too late – after Seimetz’s father died, she tried to persuade her older sister to turn his ashes into a firework, with no success.
If talking to Seimetz sounds intense, that’s because it is. I’m reminded as we chat of what TS Eliot said of John Webster, that he “saw the skull beneath the skin”. Our conversation is also lent a frisson by the fact that Seimetz is beaming in at me from the very living room in which some of her film’s creepiest scenes unfold – much of it was shot in her Los Angeles home.
It’s the first house that Seimetz, a self-identifying “vagabond”, has ever owned. She says she was disorientated by the transition from her old transient existence to something more rooted. “I lived out of a suitcase for ten years,” she says. “When I bought this house I was like, ‘I don’t know what to do with it’”. So she decided to use the building for her next film: “I was more familiar with making movies than I was with what to do with a home”.
This distinctly millennial form of alienation comes through in the film, with Amy (played memorably by House of Cards’s Kate Lyn Shiel) meandering around the house in a state of bombed-out dislocation, stroking the walls and smothering the floor like she’s never set foot on dry land.
She Dies Tomorrow, like Seimetz herself, is hard to categorise, but it often feels like a horror film you’d watch in an edgy art gallery. Seimetz paid for the film herself by ploughing in money she’d made on other projects. Her recent acting credits include a chunky role in Pet Semetary, the 2019 adaption of the Stephen King book, and a role as a pilot in Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant.
She has spoken with awe about working with Scott on such a megabucks production, but wasn’t tempted to turn She Dies Tomorrow into something more mainstream. “I had one conversation about somebody else financing it,” she tells me. “And they were like, ‘Do we see everyone die? How high is the body count?”” She realised they weren’t on the same page and that if she funded the film herself, she would retain creative control.
She Dies Tomorrow has audaciously little plot. It’s really just about a bunch of attractive people confronting their mortality. It’s extremely, sometimes irritatingly, alternative – strobe lights jitter, scenes are cut with an axe and characters talk at a snail’s pace. It’s horror, so blood is spilled, but with a stern tastefulness that never unbuttons into anything grotesque. Some are heralding the film as a work of genius that bottles the hysteria of the age, while others are saying it’s just a “moody mess”.
Seimetz is relaxed about people pinning their own interpretations onto the film. For her, it is an intensely personal work that attempts to track in particular “the arc of a panic attack”. “When I’m having one, I sometimes don’t even know that it’s happening or why I feel lightheaded,” she says. “For me, it starts almost with tunnel vision – I am outside of myself, and then I start uncontrollably shaking. You have to ride it out, you can’t fight it.”
She began having these attacks a few years ago. “I guess that’s why I was interested. They were so scary and jolting to me because I hadn’t dealt with them before. And like with anything traumatic, I was like, ‘That’s fascinating, I should analyse it, I should use it.’”
Seimetz saw an opportunity to wrest something of value from the disorientating horror of these episodes. And making the film, even if it was about something so frightening and intimate, proved cathartic. “It didn’t alleviate my existential dread, because I will still die, but in the making of it I was talking to my cinematographer, to the actors and crew and so on about how to make certain feelings tangible, and we all ended up sharing stories about our own neuroses. It became very therapeutic.”
Earlier this summer, it emerged that Seimetz was granted a restraining order against her ex-boyfriend Shane Carruth, having accused the director and actor of years of mental, physical and emotional abuse. She’d also obtained a temporary restraining order against him in 2018. It’s tempting to draw a line from Carruth’s alleged abuse to the onset in recent years of Seimetz’s panic attacks, though she doesn’t offer that explanation.
Yet she says that shooting She Dies Tomorrow in her house allowed her to exorcise its demons and confront “the feeling of being afraid that someone was watching me in my own home”. A lot of the angles in the film, she says, suggest that characters are being observed by someone “hiding behind the corner” or looking in from outside. When I point out that most people would not be soothed to have a horror film shot at home, she smiles. “My house became a living, breathing entity,” she says.
Seimetz made She Dies Tomorrow in the hope that cinema viewers would feel overwhelmed: “I wanted the seats to vibrate, for people to almost feel they can’t handle it”. Now the film is being released on streaming platforms, so most people will watch at home. But she sees the upside. Thanks to streaming, the film is reaching people who might never have bothered going to an arthouse cinema. And the film’s core subjects – death, anxiety, loneliness, fear – are looming large this year. “It’s very surreal for me, that it’s come out during this time. I could never have predicted that. But hopefully it will live outside this time, too.”
Would she choose to know her death date, like Amy and the others in the film? She shakes her head vigorously. “If I knew the date that I was going to die, I would probably treat it the same way that I treat most of my deadlines. I’d procrastinate. Four days before, I’d panic and say ‘I need to go to Paris, I need to sky-dive, I need to ring all my friends.’
“I need a deadline, but if I knew that one, I think I would be paralysed with getting it right.”
She Dies Tomorrow will be released on Curzon Home Cinema, BFI Player and digital download on Friday