#tomas stress stealing fruits

[tomas-visser]

The notice was so sudden, going to work in the morning, one announcement and that was it, by midnight they were required to be at the new building holding the whole company. And it was frustrating. They didn't have time to prepare, Skylar was going to have to handle the bakery alone, with Prometheus also scooping up their baby sister. And that first night Tomas couldn't sleep, considering he should be up and prepping and baking by now. He found himself walking through the huge indoor garden, just needed something to do, letting Charles at least sleep while he stressfully paced, hoping to just tire himself out to sleep. But the herbs and fruits do actually look and smell amazing, such care taken over them, Tomas couldn’t help pinching a few - rosemary, lavender, strawberries, oranges, maybe going back into the kitchens Cora already gave him permission to use. “Sorry!” Tomas jumped hearing someone behind him catching him in the act, almost dropping the precious produce basket, “I- I wasn’t.. sure, if I could take them..”

[diveronarpg]

Congratulations, CHARLIE! You’ve been accepted for the role of CRESSIDA. Admin Rosey: Cressida was one of my favorite characters that I’ve ever written -- a petulant bubblegum princess who is unapologetic about who she is and what she is about, on a perpetual quest to find the love of her life, even at another’s expense. Every single portrayal that I have seen of her has been unique and absolutely mindblowing. I love seeing her come to life and Charlie I am so excited to see your plots for her come to fruition! Welcome back to the gang! We stan growth and pain in this household! Please read over the checklist and send in your blog within 24 hours.

WELCOME TO THE MOB.

Out of Character

Alias | Charlie

Age | 22

Preferred Pronouns | she/her

Activity Level | 5-6/10. Currently, I only work part-time until fall when I pick up my studies again. However, the past has also shown me that I’m a rather relaxed writer who gets blocked if she feels stressed. Thus, I like to queue my replies and do them whenever I feel motivated. I’m basically around in Discord to plot and chat 24/7, though.

Timezone | CET

In Character

Character | Cressida aka Celeste Duval.

What drew you to this character? | I’ll just boldly assume that most of you recall me writing Celeste for a few months until I decided to leave the rp. While I thought about dipping my toes into a new pond (so to say), explore a new, different story, my fascination with Celeste has never fully gone away. There’s just still so much left to explore in her story, developments she can go through. Not giving her a try again, feels like a premature end, like I didn’t do her proper justice. I’ve also recently read Six of Crows which has increased my muse for Celeste considerably as the character Nina Zenik is just such a great inspiration for Celeste and actually made me realize how much I miss “my” beautiful girl who loves fiercely and bravely as much as she’s unashamed to be her own dramatic self. As silly as it probably sounds, I want to come home to my favorite rp with my favorite character.

What is a future plot idea you have in mind for the character? |

Plot 01: I know, I know, it’s a plot as old as time by now. However, as far as I know the whole Easton plotline has never really had any real consequences for her so far within the game. I want to change that because, after all, the whole thing can only go on so long. I want somebody to get suspicious of her, to confront her with the challenge of having to step up her game to keep the whole blackmail game a secret. Either she manages to get rid of Easton once and for all or she’ll be discovered which could also be very interesting. Because then she’d have to position herself well enough within the ranks of the Montagues to not simply be killed off for treason. Actually, I’d prefer the second option because it’d finally make her realize what she could lose. How important her current position is to her which she’s grown so used to that she doesn’t really value it anymore. All she can see is what she doesn’t have. Even though it might come across a little contradictory to the second plot, in my mind, it isn’t. In my mind, it’d be more a trigger for the second plot to start.

Plot 02: This isn’t her swan song, this is the sound of her wrath coming to everybody who’s ever stepped on or used her. I want her to snap, to finally have enough of being used for nothing but other people’s personal gain. She has a long history in that aspect and although she’s never been satisfied by it, has always known that she’s capable of so much more she’s tolerated it for her family’s sake. She’s married because her parents wanted her to, she’s started working for the Montagues to pay off her family’s debts. She’s allowed Easton to blackmail her to not risk putting the marriage, she’s never wanted in the first place, in danger. She’s done everything she possibly could just to get some of the recognition by her parents she’s been craving for so long. And at some point, she’s finally going to be done with it. She’s going to be done trying to impress people she’ll never be able to impress. She’s going to show everybody that they were wrong by treating her the way they did for such a long time. The last time I played Celeste, I started to put her down the road of starting to harvest her own power. To prove to herself and everybody else that she isn’t just a pawn but somebody with the potential to be powerful. I want her to start making more meaningful alliances around the Montagues, to build connections that could be of personal use to her in the hope of moving up the ranks. Also, I want her to put her on the path of realizing that she doesn’t stay with the Monts because she has to but because she chooses to. Because they’ve become her family, a place where she can grow and flourish.

Plot 03: I want to explore both her relationships with Isabella und Tomas further. The dynamic is quite the intriguing one, after all. Isabella is the love of her life, after all, but right now, Celeste also hasn’t reached the point, where she’d be willing to give up the ideas of what her marriage can do for her, just yet. Not to mention, that I imagine a part of her having grown used to Tomas love. After all, who doesn’t like to be loved and adored? However, I also can’t imagine this whole charade to go on forever. Tomas isn’t stupid, after all. Sooner or later he has to realize that something’s off. At first, she’d definitely fight for her marriage, especially if it should start to crumble at the same time of having her loyalty doubted from the Monts, simply because it’d be the only place where she’d still feel ‘powerful’. I can definitely imagine it to be sort of a cat and mouse game for a while with him doubting her and her trying to prove her faithfulness that never really existed in the first place. Not to mention that the connection Tomas has to Juliana would definitely hurt her ego. Not because she loves him but because the thought of being ‘replaced’ by somebody else, of not being good enough once more, is something she fears. It’s a fear she’s struggled with all her life, after all. However, her heart also craves to be with her lover again, the one person who’s always accepted her the way she is, where she never had to pretend or put on a show. But will Isabella still want her after all the shit Celeste has put her through? Doubtable. It’d actually be quite fun to see to have Celeste be the one doing the courting for the first time in forever, to see what she’d do to earn Isabella back.

Are you comfortable with killing off your character? | Celeste would either demand a dramatic death that steals everybody’s show or sacrifice herself for somebody she cares about, but yes, either way, I’m comfortable with killing her off.

In Depth

What is your favorite place in Verona? | As simple as the question was, Celeste didn’t know the answer. In fact, all she knew for certain was what definitely wasn’t in line for a possible answer and that would have been her parents’ place, the home she grew up in despite it having been portrayed in interior design magazines more than once. Back at school, the other children had envied her for the breathtaking, magnificent house she was living in, had made countless comments on how amazing it must be to have such a house as your home, but how could a house possibly be a home if it was empty of any love and affection? All that came to her mind when thinking of that bloody damn house was how she was never going to be enough. No, the house was just like her parents, pretty on the outside, but cold and empty on the inside. Her current home most certainly wasn’t among her favorite places (or even remotely close to becoming one) either. Another perfect example of how beauty couldn’t always buy your favor. To her, it was nothing more than a cage, golden, yet a cage nonetheless. She might have grown to like it - after all, Tomas had done his everything to furnish it to her likings - if it wasn’t the home they both shared, if it wasn’t just another reminder of everything that kept her in chains. After a moment and after having brushed a strand of fiery red hair behind her left ear as if this had been all keeping her from replying immediately, she finally responded, her head slightly tilted to the right. “I think my favorite place in all Verona is the restaurant The Two Gentlemen. Have you ever been there?” In feigned interest, her eyebrows rose slightly. “Their risotto al tastatal is to die for.” A soft chuckle followed her words as she gave the interviewer a cheeky, kittenish wink. “And nobody can’t possibly say no to a plate of the best food in the city, am I right?”

What does your typical day look like? | The corners of her plump lips tugging up into a smile, the redhead leaned back a little, finding a more comfortable position on the chair. At least this was an easy question, one she could answer without having to carefully choose every single word. “Most days I get up at around 9am. By that time, Tomas has already left work for in general, but the darling that he is he lets me sleep in, even if that means not being able to have breakfast with his wife”, she flashed an (insincere) ‘isn’t he simply the best man a girl could possibly wish for?’ look at the interviewer. “After getting ready for the day, I’ll enjoy a delicious breakfast that’s already been prepared for me by our house stuff - unlike most Italians I actually prefer a proper breakfast with some seasonal fruits, crepes, ciabatta, and some coffee.” Most days she didn’t eat that much, though, she simply liked having a wide selection to choose from. There was no need for admitting that, however. “The rest of my day is usually open, except for some appointments with various charity organizations and causes I support.” There had been a time when she’d spend the day building a fashion empire, those days were long gone though. She hadn’t been working in the typical sense ever since her marriage, concentrating on indeed supporting charity organizations by throwing events of every sort, and, of course, her work for the Montagues which actually demanded most of her time these days. Being a whore with being blackmailed as a side job was pretty time-consuming, she couldn’t help but notice with some bitterness in her mind. Anyways, after all, it wasn’t as if she could let the interviewer in on that. Celeste flashed her best ‘i know you’d all love to be me’ look at him while casually straightening her dress - not that it really needed any straightening, it was perfect, just the way it was supposed to be.

What has been your biggest mistake thus far? | ‘Being born a girl’ was the response that was on the tip of her tongue as soon as she heard the question. Almost just as quickly, defiance took over her thoughts. There was nothing second-class about being a girl. she’d proven time and time again that she was just as capable and impressive as any son could have ever been. Not that her parents cared either way. All her life, she’d heard that her birth alone was a mistake, maybe even a punishment from God because what else could be the reason for it when they’d done everything in their power to ensure they’d get a boy? There was no certainty when it came to bearing a child - apart from the wonders preimplantation diagnostics could do, obviously, and even then there was no absolute certainty -, but, of course, it was easier to put all the blame on the child instead of accepting that it might not have been in the cards for them to get a little boy. Something they’d made sure to let Celeste now every single day. That it was her fault and her fault alone to have turned out such an utter disappointment, such a failure from the very first breath she took. Despite having tried to prove the opposite all her life - mostly to her parents, but also to herself when defiance yielded to insecurity - it still stuck. No matter if she liked to admit it or not. However, there was no fucking chance that she’d ever say that out loud. Especially not in a situation she could be dead sure that it’d be in tomorrow’s newspaper. Thus, the brunette smiled once more, slightly leaning forward in a casual motion and by doing so revealing a little more of her cleavage to the interviewer. If he was into girls, he was bound to enjoy the view - they all did. On many others, it would have been a noticeable movement, one would have known that the girl was trying to hide something. This wasn’t the case for Celeste, though. After all, she’d spent years perfecting this tactic, a little move into the right angle here, a little wink and touch there, it had taken her years to come close to mastering this art, but that was bound to be good for something, right? And she definitely didn’t want him to pester her further until she gave a response to that question that gave him the juicy story he was most likely looking for. She rested her chin on the back of her hand in the most typical thinking pose the world knew, showing off her freshly manicured fingernails. “I think the decision I regret most, if there even is any, is deciding to put my fashion line on the hold after marrying”, she replied, a thoughtful expression in her eyes before she shrugged slightly, “but then again, I don’t really regret that either. After all, I knew this line would take me frequently on trips all across Europe and how could I bare staying apart from my dear husband for so long?” She feigned a soft, girly giggle. “I guess we’re still acting like newly-weds in some ways.”

What has been the most difficult task asked of you? | It was amazing how connected the last two questions were she couldn’t help to realize with some bitterness in her mind. After all, the honest answer to this one was connected to the person who just as well could have posed as the answer to the previous question. In both cases, Isabella Gagliano was involved. One might argue that falling for them could hardly be her biggest mistake for claiming she’d decided to fall for her was claiming the seasons decided to change, that the earth decided to move around the sun. But that was only splitting hairs. Not that it really mattered because there was no possible situation in which she could ever think of her feelings for that gorgeous gift from heaven as a mistake. No matter in what big trouble it got her. And it had indeed gotten her in quite a mess. Even though she’d lived up to the most difficult and painful task she’d ever been faced with. It had been, hands down, leaving them. Of course, it had to be done, there hadn’t been any other way. No matter how tempting it might have been to maintain their relationship on the side, keep them as sort of a mistress when her husband was too busy with work to miss her in his bed. After all, how could she have continued their relationship if the one thing Tomas had asked of her was to be faithful of him? It had broken her heart, no had torn it apart until nobody but them (and maybe not even them) would have been able to put it together again the way it had previously been, but she’d done it nonetheless. Because that was what a good wife, a dutiful daughter, somebody truly worthy of the Duval name did. And she was all of those things. She had to be. Her chin still resting on the back of her hand, the redhead quickly thought of an answer that would satisfy the interviewer without exposing her most vulnerable thoughts. Luckily, she had years of experience thanks to countless galas and press interviews, one of the perfect examples of how practice made perfect (not that being less than perfect had ever been an option for somebody attempting to prove that she was the perfect daughter). “What I’m going to say next, is going to sound incredibly privileged, so I’m begging you not to judge me”, she responded playfully sharing a mischevious, conspiratory smirk with him, “I’m afraid I have to admit I’ve never really been faced with any truly difficult tasks. Most things have been handed on a silver platter to me.” Internally she let out a dry, bitter laugh as couldn’t hardly be further away from the truth. “The burden of being an only child to wealthy parents. I guess my most difficult task is getting dressed each morning and picking out the perfect outfit from the broad collection I’m so incredibly blessed to have.” Those words could have come off as incredibly snobby and spoiled, thanks to her charm she hoped they didn’t however. It was amazing what you could say if you only smiled charmingly enough if you had the right expression in your big doll eyes.

What are your thoughts on the war between the Capulets and the Montagues? If she was completely honest, Celeste couldn’t care less. The Capulets and Montagues could both go to hell for all she cared. After all, none of them had ever really done anything but exploit her. Maybe her hatred for the Capulets was burning brighter at the moment considering the kidnapping they’d recently put her through, considering how they used her even more than the Montagues did. But if it was up to her, both mobs could burn at stake and she’d dance on their ashes with a content smile gracing that famous, rosy lips of hers. Of course, giving an answer that came even remotely close to what was going on in her mind would mean signing her own death warrant. And she had no interest in ending her life just yet (or ever before having truly lived her own life, for that matter). So instead of giving an honest answer, her lips curled up into a charming smile, the sort of smile men fell for as easily as moths were drawn to light. “I’m afraid a young woman like me is hardly capable of giving a qualified answer regarding a complicated matter like this”, she responded, an apologizing expression in her emerald eyes, “after all, how can somebody who grew up as sheltered and privileged as I did really say anything meaningful about that?” Casually she tugged a strand of hair out of her face behind her ear, thus stressing her young, girl like appearance. “If you want to get some qualified insight on the latest Prada collection, I’m your girl, though.”

Extras: I actually came up with a pinterest board and a small playlist for Celeste:

This Is What Makes Us Girls - Lana Del Rey High heels in her hand, swayin’ in the wind while she starts to cry, mascara runnin’ down her little Bambi eyes “Lana, how I hate those guys”.

Human - Christina Perri I can fake a smile, I can force a laugh, I can dance and play the part if that’s what you ask, give you all I am. I can do it.

Chandelier - Sia I’m the one “for a good time call”, phone’s blowin’ up, they’re ringin’ my doorbell. I’m gonna fly like a bird through the night, feel my tears as they dry.

Girls Just Wanna Have Fun - Chromatics My mother says, “When you gonna live your life right?”, My father yells, “What you gonna do with your life?”

Unstoppable - Sia All smiles, I know what it takes to fool this town. I’ll do it ‘til the sun goes down and all through the night time. Oh yeah, I’ll tell you what you wanna hear. I put my armor on, show you how strong how I am. I put my armor on, I’ll show you that I am, I’m unstoppable.

Believer - Imagine Dragons First things first, I’m fired up and tired of the way that things have been. Second thing second, don’t you tell me what you think that I can be.

Carmen - Lana Del Rey It’s alarming, honestly, how charming she can be, fooling everyone, telling ‘em she’s having fun.

This Is Me - Keala Settle They say no one’ll love you as you are, but I won’t let them break me down to dust.

[cutsliceddiced]

New top story from Time: A New Wave of Horror Films About Women’s Deepest Anxieties Is Perfect Viewing for Our Summer of Discontent

Even if most horror movies, until fairly recently, have been made by men, women are still central to their impact and meaning. What would King Kong have been without his tiny captive inamorata Fay Wray, or Frankenstein without Elsa Lanchester, his bewigged, wild-eyed bride? Sometimes women represent fragility and innocence in horror movies, symbols of purity worth saving; other times they’re sympathetic companions or spokespeople for misunderstood monsters.

But their allure goes further and deeper than that—especially when it’s women who are doing the looking. Today, the term “the male gaze” is thrown around more loosely than its originator, filmmaker and film theorist Laura Mulvey, intended. Even when there’s a man behind the camera, the lens doesn’t always simply cater to man’s desires. Women love watching other women; we identify, we admire, and sometimes we feel a frisson (or more) of desire. Other times we recoil, though that may only intensify our fascination. So what happens when women filmmakers take control of the horror genre themselves?

Women filmmakers have been making horror movies since, well, the beginning of movies—Alice Guy-Blaché and Lois Weber contributed to the genre early on. But what’s notable now is the growing number of women filmmakers who are exploring expectations and anxieties specific to womanhood, as well as the mysteries of female erotic power. In the past two months alone we’ve seen a raft of horror movies made by women—Natalie Erika James’ Relic, Romola Garai’s Amulet, Josephine Decker’s Shirley and Amy Seimetz’s She Dies Tomorrow—that are keyed in to women’s experiences in canny, unnerving ways. To define all of these films as horror, in the classic sense of the word, is admittedly a slight stretch: some are more strictly psychological than supernatural, less studies of things that go bump in the night than maps of the turmoil in our heads. But even that is a reflection of what horror, seen through women’s eyes, can mean: the things that scare women the most are already inside them. For years, male filmmakers have been concocting outlandish scenarios for us, while we’ve been storing up material for centuries.

Rob Baker AshtonImelda Staunton and carla Juri in ‘Amulet’

Horror movies made by women and specifically addressing women’s anxieties or hyperreal strengths aren’t new—Karyn Kusuma’s Jennifer’s Body (2009), Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) and Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook (also 2014) are just three noteworthy examples from the past decade or so—though it’s still surprising there haven’t been more of them. No one could have foreseen that the summer of 2020, a mini-epoch during which many of us have been confined largely to our homes, unable to socialize in the usual ways and freer than usual to nurture our own personal neuroses, would provide the perfect soil and weather conditions for a new wave of horror movies made by women to flower so fully. Some of the current crop are more effective than others, but all share one trait: They’re about vulnerability but not necessarily victimization. Most of the women in these movies aren’t heroic in the superhero sense, but they’re also not the girl who needs to be saved.

Amulet, the directorial debut from actor Romola Garai (who also wrote the script), may be the most technically ambitious of these films, and through the first two-thirds, at least, it’s jaggedly compelling. An ex-soldier from Eastern Europe, Tomas (Alec Secareanu), has taken refuge in London, working odd jobs and sleeping in a flophouse. A nun with a seemingly generous spirit (Imelda Staunton) finds a place for him to live, in a decrepit house inhabited by a young woman, Magda (Carla Juri). Magda’s ailing mother is kept locked in an upstairs room—it’s dutiful Magda’s job to tend to her day and night, and the responsibility is wearing her down.

Garai layers the plot with so many feverish ideas and images that you wonder how, in the end, it’s going to come together. There’s a woman who can’t escape horrific memories of wartime rape. And Tomas, who seems to have fallen under the spell of a strange little goddess statue he’s dug out of the earth, needs to come to terms with his inflated view of himself as a protector of women, when his own interests are clearly all that matter. For him, the house itself appears to be a moist, sticky trap: It’s at first a place he doesn’t want to be, though it soon becomes one he can’t leave. Magda, meanwhile, appears to be the trapped innocent, the woman who needs saving; she’s also a fabulous cook—but what, exactly, is she serving up? Garai has some grim fun with notions of what men expect women to be vs. who they really are. The movie is marred by a confusing coda that only muddies its already too-vague ending, but it does feature one enduring image: a squirmy, newborn bat-looking thing that emerges from a womb with all its teeth. If that’s not a childbirth-anxiety metaphor, I’m not sure what is.

Sometimes the scariest things we give birth to aren’t, at least literally, living things. In Shirley, directed by Josephine Decker and based on a novel by Susan Scarff Merrell, Elisabeth Moss plays a fictionalized version of Shirley Jackson, the author of one of the most elegantly chilling ghost novels of the 20th century, The Haunting of Hillhouse, as well as the “The Lottery,” a whoppingly effective short story that was for years a nightmare-inducing staple of junior-high literature classes. In Shirley, Moss’ Jackson is the wife of a seemingly jovial Bennington academic (Michael Stuhlbarg) who actually exerts brutish control over her. He invites two young newlyweds, Rose and Fred (Odessa Young and Logan Lerman) to move into their comfortably ramshackle Vermont home, but really, he’s just looking for cheap labor: Shirley, neurotic almost to the point of being incapacitated, is incapable not just of keeping house but of performing basic tasks, like getting dressed for the day.

Thatcher Keats—© 2018 Thatcher KeatsMichael Stuhlbarg and Elisabeth Moss in ‘Shirley’

Shirley is controlling and manipulative in her own way, but she’s also deeply charismatic. She has a knowledge of witchcraft and folklore, and an affinity for the Tarot. But most of all, she’s blazingly intelligent, and Rose, who has had to put her own studies on hold with the birth of her first child, is drawn to her. Shirley’s lack of suitability for the real world—she’s treated as an oddity and a pariah by her husband’s university friends—means she lives in a world of her own, one in which she drinks too much and stays in bed too long, unable to move and, worse, unable to write. When she confronts a blank page, she’s really staring down a demon. She’s so difficult, in her husband’s eyes, that he’s taken up with the ostensibly more attractive wife of a fellow academic—so her sexual power has been diminished too. Shirley isn’t a horror movie in the conventional sense, but it’s a picture that stirs up the murk of so many women’s fears: If I can’t create something of worth, does that mean I too am worthless? If I have a child, what part of myself do I lose—and how do I ever get it back? This movie has a strange, heady earthiness, like an alluring perfume sourced from an enchanted, and somewhat treacherous, forest.

If the season’s most memorable horror movies have been made by women, that’s not to say men aren’t capable or interested in shaping horror scenarios from a woman’s point of view. In Leigh Wannell’s The Invisible Man, released in February, Moss played a woman stalked by the controlling boyfriend—cloaked by an invisibility suit—she’d thought dead. And Janelle Monáe stars in Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz’s upcoming Antebellum, playing a successful modern-day writer who suddenly finds herself living a very different life, in what looks like the pre-Civil War south. Never underestimate the power of the sympathetic imagination, and remember that women are free to explore the dimensions of men’s inner lives, too.

But even though men must feel just as much stress as women do when it comes to doing right by an elderly parent, I’m not sure a man could have made Relic. Emily Mortimer and Bella Heathcote play Kay and Sam, a mother and daughter who drive out to Kay’s mother’s house, way out in the country, when they learn that she hasn’t been seen for days. They let themselves in and poke around her things, tidying up and taking stock of all the placemarkers we use to track exactly where our parents are at as they age. There’s some shriveled fruit stacked in a bowl; little Post-It reminders (“Turn off the stove,” “Switch off the light”) abound, most of them exactly the sort of thing that a person whose memory is failing might write to herself. But among them is one that reads, “Don’t follow it”—a suggestion that she’s being stalked by something, as opposed to someone.

The next morning, Kay’s mother—and Sam’s grandmother—appears in the kitchen, as if she had never gone missing. But something is clearly wrong. Edna, played by Australian actor Robyn Nevin, is herself—yet not herself. One minute her eyes are dancing with warmth; the next they’ve gone cold, as if her own family members have suddenly become hostile strangers. She gives Sam, who’s always adored her, a ring, only to later angrily accuse her of stealing it. Kay, who’s filled with mostly unspecified guilt—does a daughter’s guilt ever have to be specified?—recognizes that she hasn’t been in touch with her mother as often as she should have been. She also thinks it’s time she found a safer place for Edna to live. She visits a nursing home, where the manager says with businesslike cheerfulness, “Think of it as independent living with the edges taken off.” It’s the most chilling line in the movie.

Courtesy of IFC MidnightEmily Mortimer in ‘Relic’

Director Natalie Erika James—who co-wrote the script with Christian White—uses horror-palette colors to explore tensions endemic to mothers and daughters, both between Edna and Kay and between Kay and Sam. Tempers flare over the smallest things; at one point or another, each of the three bristles when she senses another is telling her what to do. There’s nothing supernatural about any of that. But something is happening to Edna—she’s changing in ways that alarm Kay and Sam. Anyone who has watched a parent age—who has seen the number of selves one person can inhabit in a lifetime, moving from one stage to another in a gentle gradient spanning decades—will recognize Kay’s anguish. Relic’s ending is an embrace of terror and tenderness. So many horror filmmakers start out with great ideas and don’t know how to wrap them up. James caps off her debut feature with a quietly intense operatic flourish that feels earned.

If our imaginations are capable of conjuring great horrors as well as wonder, here’s a question: Can we pass our most acute fears, virus-style, on to others? In her shivery, evocative and sometimes surprisingly funny existential 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, as she’s moving into the house she’s just bought, becomes seized with a fear she can’t explain: She’s certain she’s going to die the next day. In a panic, she calls her closest friend, Jane (Jane Adams), begging her to come over. When Jane finally shows up, she tries to talk sense into her friend—only to return home, get into her PJs, and suddenly feel paralyzed by the same fear. When Jane confesses 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. The whole movie is like a game of telephone in which an urgent message is passed along from one player to another, fuzzy at first before emerging into disquieting clarity.

Courtesy of NeonKate Lyn Sheil in Amy Seimetz’s ‘She Dies Tomorrow’

She Dies Tomorrow takes place in a world much like the one we’re living in right now, one that feels untrustworthy, not fully readable. It’s also a place where we might feel regret about some things we are capable of controlling: at one point, Amy tells a guy who appears to be a fairly new lover (Kentucker Audley) that she once ended a pregnancy. His face clouds over as she elaborates; the information seems to trouble him more than it does her, even though she’s the one who will carry the knowledge of the act forever. She notes that her life would be so different if she’d kept the child; she probably wouldn’t have been able to buy this house. Her practicality is the opposite of coldness—she knows the cost of her choice, because it lives inside her every day.

And what if it’s not the greater world but ourselves we can’t trust? Our certainty that we’ll have a tomorrow amounts not to everyday optimism but to a kind of arrogance—though we probably need that self-reassurance to survive. This is less a movie about death than one concerned with how we go through life without giving too much thought about its stopping, though that’s a certainty for all of us. Even when we think we’re thinking about death, we don’t really know what to think: No one trustworthy has yet returned from the other side to tell us what it’s all about. She Dies Tomorrow is all about the unreclaimable yesterday, the day before we knew. It’s a thoughtful movie with no jump scares; its jitters are baked all the way through.

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 relationship with aging—which includes the fear of losing sexual allure—our fear of death has a slightly different tenor from the way men experience it. In Shirley, the aging, matronly protagonist is not only unable to write, which is her chief measure of her own self-worth; her husband has also taken up with a supposedly superior woman—and isn’t the moment we lose faith in our own magnetism itself a small death? Watching our parents age, as Kay does in Relic, is the ultimate reminder that we’re next; it’s also a test of our mettle when we see the traits that have calcified in our forebears begin to manifest themselves, in smaller ways, in us. In Amulet, the exhausted Magda has a different 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. But all, in some way, speak of constricted freedom, of carrying 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.

via https://cutslicedanddiced.wordpress.com/2018/01/24/how-to-prevent-food-from-going-to-waste