The things
that scare
women the
most are
already
inside themto doing right by an elderly parent. But
I’m not sure a man could have made
Relic. Emily Mortimer and Bella Heath-
cote play Kay and Sam, a mother and
daughter who become alarmed when
they learn that Kay’s mother Edna
hasn’t been seen for days. They drive
to her remote house, where they poke
around her things, tidying up and tak-
ing stock of all the place
markers we use to track ex-
actly where our parents are
at as they age. There’s some
shriveled fruit in a bowl;
little Post-it reminders are
marked with phrases
like Turn off The sTove.
The next morning, Edna—
played by Australian actor Robyn
Nevin— appears in the kitchen, as if
she’d never gone missing. But some-
thing is very wrong. Edna is herself —yet
not. One minute her eyes dance with
warmth; the next they’ve gone cold,
seeing her own family members as hos-
tile strangers. Kay, meanwhile, is filled
with guilt over the fact that her relation-
ship with Edna hasn’t been particularly
amicable. She also thinks it’s time to
sometimes surprisingly funny existen-
tial thriller She Dies Tomorrow, writer-
director Amy Seimetz burrows deep
into some of our dumbest 3 a.m. fears,
and wonders aloud, What if they’re not
so dumb? Kate Lyn Sheil plays Amy,
a young woman who becomes seized
with a fear she can’t explain: she’s cer-
tain she’s going to die the next day. In a
panic, she calls her closest friend, Jane
(Jane Adams), begging her to come over.
Jane shows up and tries to talk sense
into her friend—only to return home,
get into her pj’s and suddenly feel para-
lyzed by the same fear. When Jane con-
fesses her anxiety to others—to her
brother (Chris Messina), to the doctor
to whom she goes for treatment (Josh
Lucas)—they too downplay her distress,
only to find themselves captive to the
same debilitating panic minutes later.
She Dies Tomorrow takes place in a
world much like the one we’re living in
right now, one that feels untrustworthy.
Yet what if it’s not the greater world but
ourselves we can’t trust? Fear of death
isn’t specific to women, obviously—
the male characters in Seimetz’s movie
are susceptible to it too. But maybe,
given women’s often complex relation-
ship with aging, our fear of death has a
slightly different tenor. In Shirley, the
matronly, middle-aged protagonist is
not only unable to write, which is her
chief measure of her own self-worth,
but her husband has also taken up with
a supposedly superior woman—and
isn’t the moment we lose faith in our
own magnetism a small death? Watch-
ing our parents age, as Kay does in Relic,
is a test of our mettle when we see the
traits that have calcified in our forebears
begin to manifest themselves in us. In
Amulet, the exhausted Magda has a dif-
ferent problem: she’s simply waiting for
her mother to die so she can be free.
All of these movies were conceived
and made before we had any sense of
how a worldwide pandemic would
shape and circumscribe our lives. Yet
all speak of constricted freedom, of
carry ing on with life until it decides it’s
through with us. They’re about all the
things we can’t protect ourselves from,
what we used to call, in more innocent
times, fear of the unknown. Now we
know what to fear—only to realize that
knowing isn’t necessarily better. □find a safer place for her mother to live.
She visits a nursing home, where the
manager says with businesslike cheer-
fulness, “Think of it as independent
living with the edges taken off.” It’s the
movie’s most chilling line.
Director Natalie Erika James—who
co-wrote the script with Christian
White—uses horror- palette colors to
explore tensions endemic
to mothers and daughters.
There’s nothing supernatural
about any of that. But anyone
who has watched a parent age
will recognize Kay’s anguish
as she traces the changes in
Edna’s behavior and bear-
ing. Relic’s ending is an em-
brace of terror and tenderness. So many
horror-film makers start out with great
ideas and don’t know how to wrap them
up. James caps off her debut feature with
an operatic flourish that feels earned.If our ImagInatIons are capable of
conjuring great horrors as well as won-
der, here’s a question: Can we pass on
our most acute fears, virus-style, to
others? In her shivery, evocative and