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A sketch for Margiela’s tabi bootIf wrIter-dIrector Amy SeImetz’S
indie thriller She Dies Tomorrow were
a song rather than a movie, it would be
the anthem for our current age of anxi-
ety, an artfully atonal ode to the eternal
question, Am I imagining this, or is it re-
ally happening? Amy (Kate Lyn Sheil) is
settling into the house she’s just bought
when she suffers what appears to be a
panic attack. She calls a close friend,
Jane (Jane Adams), begging her to come
over. Her voice is so weak, she can barely
make herself heard, though it’s also un-
clear whether she’s speaking at all—
it’s as if all communication has broken
down cosmically as well as digitally.
When Jane shows up, Amy outlines
the cause of her anguish: she’s con-
vinced she’s going to die the next day.
Jane reassures her that this cannot pos-
sibly be true—only to return home and
find herself seized by the certainty that
she too is destined to die on the morrow.
Jane confesses her anxiety to others (her
brother, Chris Messina; a doctor, Josh
Lucas), who try to calm her, until panic
seizes them as well. It appears that Amy
is an unwitting superspreader, a Jenny
Appleseed sowing debilitating fears of
mortality from one person to the next.If all of that sounds vaguely comical
and unsettling, that’s the point: the mov-
ie’s oblique, jittery rhythms are designed
to make us feel a little crazy too, before
we come to our senses and laugh at our-
selves. Seimetz has been working in
film and television for years as an actor,
writer, director and producer; she has
appeared in films like Pet Sematary, and
she directed the 2012 thriller Sun Don’t
Shine. She’ll try her hand, fearlessly, at
anything. Perched at the restless mid-
point of psychological and super natural
horror, She Dies Tomorrow is dotted with
experimental fourishes: the screen is
occasionally smeared with what looks
like blood, though it might be an ecto-
plasmic communiqué from another
world. And there’s no tidy resolution—
She Dies Tomorrow leaves a trail of jag-
ged question marks in its wake.
But that, too, appears to be part of its
design. In all likelihood, most of us will
wake up tomorrow and manage to sur-
vive the day. But Seimetz’s movie plants
that one unruly seed of doubt: you just
never know. —S.z.SHE DIES TOMORROW is available to stream
on various platforms beginning Aug. 7MOVIES
Tomorrow is another day—maybeMOVIES
Mysterious
genius, revealed
Miraculously, the revolutionary
Belgian designer Martin
Margiela—from his start in the
late 1980s until 2008, when
he left the house that bears his
name—has never shown his
face in public. His creations—
angular white tunics poised to
take wing, strangely erotic soft
leather boots with a tabi-style
split toe—could be jarringly
conceptual or starkly beautiful,
and were often both. But his
insistence on privacy ensured
that the clothes always spoke
for themselves.
If that approach makes
Margiela sound arrogant,
Reiner Holzemer’s superb
documentary Martin Margiela:
In His Own Words proves the
opposite. Holzemer never
shows the designer’s face, but
we hear his voice and see his
hands: he explains how his
anonymity gave him freedom
(“I knew I could give more if I
felt protected”), and we watch
as he fashions a sturdily
exquisite necklace from a
champagne cork and a length
of black ribbon. The effect is
so intimate that we walk away
with an almost tactile sense
of who Martin Margiela is, the
way we confidently, yet only sort
of, know what the man in the
moon looks like. His mystery
becomes our secret too. —S.Z.MARTIN MARGIELA is available
on streaming platforms beginning
Aug. 14△
MARTIN MARGIELA: OSCILLOSCOPE; SHE DIES TOMORROW: NEON Mark it on the calendar: Sheil plays a woman who’s certain her death is imminent