I know I’ve said this before but, if David Lynch made dramas, I think “The Life Before Her Eyes” would be the movie he’d direct. It’s an elaborate and crushing tragedy that unfolds layers of melodrama and hidden meanings that writer Stern leaves cleverly ambiguous for the audience to decide long after the credits have rolled. What would you do to save your own life? Could you live with yourself if you made a decision that would greatly affect someone else in order to spare your own misery? And more so, how far would you go to save someone else’s life in the midst of a senseless event? Likely to go on my top 10 of 2008, “The Life Before Her Eyes” is a drama that mixes social commentary, existentialism, and mysticism with a dash of alternate reality-time travel trickery to tell the story of Diana and Maureen, two best friends in high school who one day find themselves in the middle of a vicious school shooting unfortunate enough to be standing in a bathroom with no place to hide. Director Perelman takes this time to completely leave this situation in the air as we cut back to Diana in her present where the anniversary of the school shooting looms.

While I found myself utterly confused and pointing out the sheer errors in timeline, I later began to realize what Perdim was going for, and everything “The Life Before Her Eyes” purports to be in the first half completely undermines our expectations by taking a second look at fate, and morality. How far would you go to save yourself? How far would you go to save someone else? Respective cast members Evan Rachel Wood and Eva Amurri are utterly fantastic as the polar opposite best friends Diana and Maureen who come of age in their small town. The story shifts back and forth from the events leading in to the horrific shooting, to the struggles of Diana with her relationships. Uma Thurman is especially good as the adult Diana who has difficulties discerning imagination from reality in her life, and can barely cope day by day with her anxiety let alone her rebellious young daughter looking to test her mother’s discipline as far as she can. “The Life Before Her Eyes” doesn’t particularly jab at the issue of school shootings, and doesn’t try to pick apart reasoning and the pure vicious act of murder. Instead it simply asks us a question that seems so simple, yet is nearly impossible to answer until we’ve been there.

It’s an underrated, and horrific little dramatic thriller that twists the noose at every turn with a story that unfolds more and more to where we’re never sure what to make of it. When we finally have figured it out, Perdim leaves many more questions for us but has left us with a beautiful statement about our own courage in the face of death.