Oscar-nominee Uma Thurman plays a suburban wife and mother who begins to question her seemingly perfect life and perhaps her sanity on the 15th anniversary of a tragic high school shooting that took the life of her best friend. In flashbacks, Diana is a vibrant high schooler (played by Evan Rachel Wood of THIRTEEN and THE UPSIDE OF ANGER) who, with her shy best friend Maureen, plot typical teenage strategies, cutting class, fantasizing about boys and vow to leave their sleepy suburb at the first opportunity. The older Diana, however, is haunted by the increasingly strained relationship she had with Maureen as day of the school shooting approached. These memories disrupt the idyllic life she's now leading with her professor husband Paul and their young daughter Emma. As older Diana's life begins to unravel and younger Diana gets closer and closer to the fatal day, a deeper mystery slowly unravels.
Based on author Laura Kasischke's novel The Life Before Her Eyes, House of Sand and Fog director Vadim Perelman's provocative study of memory, morality, and conscience stars Uma Thurman as the guilt-ridden survivor of a harrowing, Columbine-like high-school shooting. To any outsider, Diana (played as a young girl by actress Evan Rachel Wood) and Maureen (Eva Amurri) were polar opposites; Diana was always questioning authority, while Maureen quietly went about fulfilling the expectations of her devoutly religious family.
The Life Before Her Eyes explores the reverberations stemming from the collision of past and future, reality and dream. Life can end in an instant-yet the echoes of possible futures been remain inescapable. Moving backwards and forwards in time, it combines the dramatic intensity of Sophie's Choice with the eerie mystery of a ghost story like The Others.