85 min | R | July 31, 2020 | Neon
A woman wakes up certain she will die tomorrow. The certainty is contagious. Everyone she tells catches it like a cold, and the dread spreads through her friends until the whole movie is sick with it.
Amy moves into a new house and becomes convinced she will be dead within a day. She has no diagnosis and no logic. She has only the conviction, and the conviction is absolute. She tells her friend Jane, and Jane catches it. Jane carries it to a birthday party, and the guests catch it too. The film is not about dying. It is about how a feeling moves from one body to the next and overrides reason on contact.
Kate Lyn Sheil plays Amy as a woman who has stopped fighting. She drifts through her empty house in a sequined dress, orders an urn online, asks to be turned into a leather jacket. Sheil makes the surrender feel relaxed rather than tragic, which is the unsettling part. Jane Adams plays Jane as the anxious counterweight, scratching at her arm and laughing at her own bad nerves until the dread lands on her and the laughter stops. Katie Aselton and Chris Messina play Susan and Jason as a couple whose dinner-party smugness curdles into terror in real time. Tunde Adebimpe and Jennifer Kim play Brian and Tilly, a doomed pair who decide to spend their last hours saying the cruelest true things they can.
Amy Seimetz writes and directs a horror film with no monster and no kill. She marks each infection with the same effect. A face fills the frame and washes over in pulsing red and blue light while a fragment of Mozart’s Requiem swells on the soundtrack. The device should grow tired by the third use. It does not, because Seimetz keeps changing what the colors land on. The editing refuses to explain the contagion and refuses to cure it, and the sound design treats a buzzing fly and a leaf blower as instruments of pure menace.
This is a mood that has been engineered into a structure. Seimetz takes a single irrational feeling and traces its path through a social network, and she trusts the feeling to carry the film without a plot to prop it up. The result plays as both an anxiety attack and a study of one. It knows that the worst ideas are the ones you cannot argue your way out of, and it knows that you will hand yours to the next person before you even understand it.