Amy Seimetz’s Mirror Worlds
The director and actress flirts with death once again
Amy seimetz is laughing. The laughter is always triggered by things one might not normally laugh about, from the ravages of illness to the catastrophes of the pandemic. It ranges from a wry chuckle to a full-on roar, her head thrown back. This happens countless times as we talk about She Dies Tomorrow, the 38-year-old director-actress’s third feature. The movie is about a woman named Amy (Kate Lyn Sheil) who has a breakdown over the prospect of her impending death. At least it seems impending: It’s never explained why, exactly, Amy is convinced she’ll be gone before the next sunset. We just observe her as she melts down in her house (which also happens to be Seimetz’s home in the Mount Washington neighborhood of Los Angeles). Then, over the course of the next few hours, she transmits her fear of oblivion to others, including her friend (Jane Adams), her caring but exasperated brother (Chris Messina), and his self-centered wife (Katie Aselton), who is having a birthday party and berates Amy for being a bummer.
“Death is the cruelest joke, you know?,” Seimetz tells me from her living room. That the set of She Dies Tomorrow serves as the backdrop to our conversation adds one more plane to the hall of mirrors. “You’re born, you’re conscious, and, the entire time, the trick is to deny the inevitable.”
Death and grief are adjacent to a lot of art when they aren’t at the center. But it’s still striking to look at Seimetz’s filmography as both performer and filmmaker and realize how many of her projects have dealt with death, either as an abstract concept or head-on, via genre. Last year, she starred in the remake of Pet Sematary,
about a family that discovers it can bring the dead back to life with monstrous results. In 2017, she was a member of the ensemble cast of Alien: Covenant, the latest entry in science fiction’s indestructible franchise about violation, gestation, extinction, and rebirth. In 2013, she starred as the mother of a murdered teenage girl in AMC’s The Killing. Two years before that, she co-starred in Adam Wingard’s indie slasher flick You’re Next.
You could even say death was the inspiration for her award-winning 2012 feature, Sun Don’t Shine, a microbudget effort that got a modest release but wound up as a critics’ darling. The film follows a desperately unhappy couple (Sheil and Kentucker Audley) traveling through a swampy landscape (Florida, Seimetz’s native state) that becomes more menacing by the scene; in the trunk of their car, we learn, is the body of her murdered husband. The film opens with the couple embroiled in what appears to be a fight to the death, grappling on swampy ground, literally getting down in the muck. The scene embodies Seimetz’s earthy, blunt approach to filmmaking, although—in collaboration with another trusted creative partner, her regular cinematographer, Jay Keitel—the visuals are also spectacular and intuitive, shifting with the emotions of their heroine from mundane to nightmarish and back.
Both Sun Don’t Shine and She Dies Tomorrow are notable for what they don’t reveal to the viewer, letting mood, performance, and striking imagery do the work of carrying us along elliptical narratives that might have, in other hands, leaned more heavily into genre. She Dies Tomorrow plays like a slasher picture or a podpeople movie in which the audience is denied a glimpse of the threat all the way to the end. Instead, we see Amy both close up and from a distance as the character wanders her house crying and babbling and leaning against a living-room wall, touching it as if it’s hot. But after a while, a funny or maybe not funny thing happens: She Dies Tomorrow morphs into a pitch-black absurdist comedy as each new character becomes infected by Amy’s fear of death after coming into contact with her. The film’s deft handoff of dread inspired critics to peg it as a “pandemic movie” when it premiered at this year’s South by Southwest—online, of course, as the festival had been shut down at the last minute so it wouldn’t become an epicenter of plague. But to Seimetz, it’s a semi-autobiographical exploration of feelings that she suppresses every day, whether or not external factors like a pandemic or the loss of a loved one happen to amplify it.
“When I drive on a really high bridge, the thing that’s going through my brain is, Don’t drive off the edge, don’t drive off the edge,” she says, chuckling. “Freud’s theory was that insanity, schizophrenia, and bipolar are [the conditions] of somebody who cannot deny death. And society, in order to function, needs to have denial of death because it’s paralyzing. In order to make progress and to think about future generations, you have to deny that you’re going to die.”
seimetz says she named the protagonist of She Dies Tomorrow Amy because it seemed ridiculous to pretend the character wasn’t herself. “I thought, Let’s just get rid of the artifice.” At the heart of the film lies Seimetz’s experience from 11 years ago, when she put her career on hold to return to the Tampa–St. Petersburg area, where she grew up, to care for her father, who’d had several strokes and was in decline. “It’s like if you see this giant house in the distance and all the lights are on and then you’re watching one light from each room go off over the period of like three years,” she says.
Seimetz started making films during a semester spent at NYU. She graduated from Florida State University, where she majored in literature and art history and acted in student shorts, making friends who would go on to be important in the film industry, including Moonlight producer Adele Romanski and writerdirector Barry Jenkins, whom Seimetz met in the student union’s darkroom. When she moved to Los Angeles a year later, she had no intention of pursuing