Morally repugnant

and if all that doesn't turn you off, the fact this movie sucks should...

Moi?

A considered reponse deserves a considered reply.
I don't see or feel the empathy you describe but if you do feel it, who am I argue?
I can only repeat I felt manipulated. Diana's fate seems unearned and instead felt like a lesson espoused by some seemingly cool, heartfelt man-of-the-people-type preacher who, deep down, would rather hang your soul out over the fiery pit of Hell and drop it.
It's as if the director, too, felt Diana was less worthy.
I have no interest in learning that lesson.
I understand from some of the threads here that in the book Diana tells the killer to shoot Maureen.
All the more reason, morally then, to kill Diana. I just detest being given only those kind of options in a work of fiction.

You're take on Million Dollar Baby is fascinating, though. I liked that movie but didn't love it, and I never took away the idea Eastwood supported euthanasia. But the Catholic angle I didn't see, so thanks.
Million Dollar Baby displays a humanity I'm much more comfortable with than I am with this movie.
Speaking of "Catholic," did you ever see, "The End of the Affair," with Ralph Fiennes and Julianne Moore, based on the Graham Greene novel from the 1950s? It didn't get a lot of really great reviews but it took weeks for me to get it out of my system.

green, actually I think we both get the point, we just interpret it differently.
I agree, Diana thought she deserved to die. And then the director went right ahead and let her die, even gloried in it with all those arty mirror shots and her body falling in slow motion from different angles with blood splatter and water gushing out all over. Very beyoodiful. Can you imagine how many takes that took? I have a thing about directors who use sadism to move a story along, especially when they employ it while hiding behind some sick spiritual "truth" they imagine they're spouting.
I'm not advocating movies as some sort of therapy session whereby a 17-year-old girl gets to work through her guilt to discover some inner strength, but I am extremely opposed to a person's guilt over something being enough to warrant a death sentence.
I still feel guilty about an incident that happened to me when I was 10 years old. I called a good friend a mamma's boy because some other, cooler - or so I thought - kids I wanted to like me had called him one. It ended the friendship forever and he was a good kid. I still feel bad about it but please don't kill me for it. Kids do mean things without always realizing what it says about their own insecurities.

And, no, I was never biased against Diana. One likely reason was because she was played by Evan Rachel Wood who oozes complexity even when her character is not written with much of it. Also, Diana grew up to be a complex adult - or so we are led to believe before the ending (Since all the adult scenes are merely Diana's fantasizing, it amused me she imagined herself growing up to look exactly like Uma Thurman.)
When, in one of last cuts to the washroom, Diana removed her hand from Maureen's it suprised me into thinking it seemed to mean she was going to tell the guy to kill Maureen.
That's because in real life, if a kid's going around with a gun killing people it's going to be at random and if you're not killed you're just lucky.
Which brings up another point about the falseness of this movie. Do you think Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold or that guy from Virginia Tech went around asking friends to choose which one wanted to die? That may have worked in "Sophie's Choice," which "Life Before Her Eyes" takes a lot from. But that was a much bigger work of fiction and one that was able to explore the psychology because the entire work took place after Sophie had made her choice.
It was profoundly annoying the killer in this movie knew enough about what the writer and director wanted to ask his victims to choose and so conveniently play right into the story line. That's cheesy writing.
Sorry about pontificating. I love moves, just not this one.

I don't think she thought she deserved to die, but rather that she had this one chance to prove herself truly worthy of Maureen's friendship. Despite the mutual tendency for the two girls to push each other's buttons, Diana truly admired Maureen and thought of her as kind of a paragon of goodness while Maureen admired Diana for her daring nature and strong will. When Maureen proves her goodeness and the level of her friendship by offering to sacrifice herself to save her friend, Diana imagines her life as it might be if she lets Maureen sacrifice herself. Ultimately, though, she decides to prove herself as good a friend to Maureen as Maureen is to her. The fact that each was willing to sacrifice herself for the other demonstrates that it was a true equal friendship - each girl loved and cared equally for the other. I think that the real message of the film was about love to the point of sacrificing oneself for another. That was the significance of "the heart is the strongest muscle."

Sometimes an idea is so bad that it starts to be good again.

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Hooray kmware13!

Good job at seeing the true message - we are not just the sum total of what we do. Humanity is infinitely more complex than that. One of the only simple things you can say is that selfishness is a default.

Great movie, and heroic for handling uniquely an edgy topic.