Produced by Neon, who recently brought us Parasite and Portrait of a Lady on Fire among many others, She Dies Tomorrow is Amy Seimetz’s horror thriller about a woman who finds out she has one day left before her death. While the premise may sound like standard horror fare, the film proves to be anything but that, which, in this case, hardly worked for me. “Self-indulgent” is a phrase that’s often thrown around for longer films, but sitting at 84 minutes, one would think this doesn’t match it. One would be wrong. She Dies Tomorrow wallows in its seemingly purposeless stylistic flourishes so much that the film’s ideas fail to catch up to its pretentious ambitions. By the end, you’re left feeling somehow both bored and bummed. The film accomplishes the former by giving the audience little to latch onto in terms of character, scarce dramatic build up, and a whimper of a climax, but the latter? Being “bummed” by the end is the best compliment I can give the film: at its strongest, it sometimes uses its nonlinear narrative and strong stylistic choices to disorient the viewer, and build up a palpable sense of dread. But, alas, the fleeting moments of true terror that it manages to instill in audiences are quickly exchanged for more of nothing. It hardly follows any sense of structure, and if that worked to effectively keep the audience engaged or feeling anything other than “huh?”, then it wouldn’t be an issue. Instead, the film uses these jarring, cryptic visual, auditory, and narrative devices simply, it feels, for the sake of using them.

She Dies Tomorrow squanders a potentially promising premise on flashy, ambiguous visuals and a barely coherent plot, preventing its glimmers of good ideas from shining through.

Rating: 3.7/10