Director Amy Seimetz’s eerily relevant, visually trippy nightmare fable begins with Amy (Kate Lyn Sheil), who suddenly becomes convinced that she will be dead tomorrow.
Unfortunately, her morbid “idee fixe” has a communicable effect on her friends, and this overwhelming dread begins to consume them also. The director’s use of stylized lighting and jarring musical cues adds to the weirdly disarming mood of the film.
Actors I really admire pop up throughout the movie, such as the divine Jane Adams as Amy’s neurotic friend Jane, Chris Messina as Jane’s worried married brother, Josh Lucas as a disturbed doctor and Michelle Rodriguez as a neighbor discussing, with her equally doomed roommate, how much she’s going to miss “trees.”
The nightmare logic of the film reminded me of that “I Started A Joke” finale of Penn & Teller Get Killed, and in these virulently contagious times, the idea of an emotionally infectious anxiety spreading throughout the land is scarily on target.
The film opens at several drive-ins this weekend and “On Demand” August 7th.
