“I just came back to see if this is real, if you were real.”
Kate Lyn Sheil, suspiciously named Amy in a movie written/directed by an Amy, is a mess, acting strangely in her new house and insisting that she dies tomorrow. Her friend Jane (Adams, star of Happiness) comes over to check on Amy, then Jane goes home to her microscope art and classical music until the flashing colored lights from Amy’s psychosis start to invade the house – and now Jane, too, will die tomorrow.
Jane’s checkup doesn’t go great:
In the parlance of the kids, this movie is a “mood,” and I am “here for it.” Amy and Jane wander into the world, their imminent death syndrome passing to everyone they meet. The movie begins to feel like a last day on earth story, like Last Night – no explanation is ever given, but we’re also given no reason not to believe the doomed protagonists. Some get high or go on adventures, some get real – break up relationships, disconnect their dad from life support(!). Instead of ending up an urn of ashes, Amy wants to be a leather jacket, and focuses her efforts on this. The cast plays it straight and is uniformly strong, including the usual suspects with some delightful additions (Michelle Rodriguez! James Benning?). It’s even produced by Benson and Moorhead, just gobs of talent.
Tunde Adebimpe!
Bilge Ebiri in Vulture:
As a filmmaker, Seimetz started off in the experimental world, and her willingness to let her narrative occasionally slip into abstraction serves her well, suggesting broader, more cosmic meanings. Her images blur, her frames pulse and shiver, bubbling microscopic phenomena wash over the screen, and fields of unreal color overwhelm the characters. The soundtrack assaults us with ominous thrums, blasts of classical music, whispers, and distant screams. The film is short and sparsely populated, but it can’t be called minimalist — it’s more of a clipped maximalism, bursting with expressive power before quickly pulling back, like a tale told by someone both eager and afraid to let you in on their darkest secrets.
Seimetz in Brooklyn Rail:
I was saying the other night at the Brooklyn premiere, sometimes, when I’m watching movies, the first 15 minutes are giving me a character’s CV, [spelling out] what this person does, what they do for a living, their boyfriend, their relationship status…as opposed to accessing something that I can’t put into words and just showing me their behavior, which I’m much more fascinated by. To do away with, “Okay, this is the character I’m exploring,” and just go, “We’re exploring that feeling,” and doing that with each individual actor and saying, “This is the energy you’re bringing to the scene,” as opposed to, “You work as a florist.”
