This is the dramatic setup for a movie called “Tuesday,” and it’s to the credit of writer-director Daina O. Pusić, a Croatian filmmaker making her feature debut, that she establishes the reality of this fantastical concept in the space of three eerie, elegant opening minutes. But then the rest of the movie happens, and it’s a bumpy ride indeed.
The other thing you should know is that Tuesday is not a day in “Tuesday” but a girl: a terminally ill 15-year-old Londoner (Lola Petticrew) who hasn’t left her bedroom in weeks, if not months, and who is visited by the Macaw of Death early in the movie. What’s unusual is that Tuesday doesn’t immediately recoil in fear but talks calmly to Death. Death, relieved to be able to have a conversation for once, talks back. The Nigerian-born, London-raised actor Arinzé Kene provides the bird’s voice, a guttural croak that seems to carry the wisdom and weariness of the ages.
There’s a third point to the dramatic triangle in “Tuesday,” and it’s the dying girl’s mother, Zora, who is played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus in a change-of-pace performance that some will call brave and others will call foolhardy. They’re both right. Zora has put up a tough and cheerful front for her daughter, but behind the bravura, she’s a wreck who has quit her job and sold half her household to pay for Tuesday’s care. (Why hasn’t the girl noticed the movers coming to cart the furniture away? What exactly is Tuesday dying of? Where’s her father? Why is Zora American and her daughter British? If you find yourself asking these questions, you’re obviously an insensitive lout.)
“Tuesday” is a parable about grieving, and accepting the inevitability of death, that keeps getting sidetracked by the startling literalness of its conceit. The visual effects teams headed by Mike Stillwell and Andrew Simmonds renders Death as a bewitching feathered creation, mysterious and powerful yet oddly sympathetic — half animal consciousness, half angel. The creature gets so caught up in its relationship with Tuesday that it forgets to do its job, and in classic Death Takes a Holiday tradition, an apocalypse slowly envelops London and the world as the dying simply aren’t able to die. Pusić plays these vignettes for horror-movie gore, even as the tenderness of the Tuesday/macaw connection gets drowned out by the mother’s increasingly frenzied attempts to keep Death from her daughter’s bedside.
Well, what would you do if it were your child? Is it possible to kill Death? Is it worth a try? Louis-Dreyfus’s performance is a curio, rigid with intensity, trembling with fury and sadness, and finally burning with a zeal that results in some of the movie’s more indelible scenes. I can say no more other than to note that the mother herself goes through a few changes that evoke Lewis Carroll at his most extreme. (By contrast, Petticrew anchors the movie with pale, assured intelligence as the daughter.)
Aside from a few appearances by a bewildered young hospice nurse (Leah Harvey), “Tuesday” is effectively a three-hander of mother/daughter/bird that grows increasingly serious and strange as it goes. Unlike in similar metaphysical fantasy-dramas of recent years — I’m thinking of George Miller’s “Three Thousand Years of Longing” (2022), with Tilda Swinton and a genie in the shape of Idris Elba locked in a hotel room, or the lovely, limbo-set “Nine Days” (2020) — the strangeness and tonal shifts clutter the foreground in “Tuesday” to the point that they block out the difficult and delicate emotions that Pusić is intent on addressing.
Because the death of one’s child is pretty much the worst thing most people can imagine, the director and her star are to be commended for taking a creative core sample of the pitch-black emotions surrounding this fact. At its intermittent best, “Tuesday” pulls a rough and breathtaking beauty from the cataclysm. At its worst, it’s for the birds.
R. At area theaters. Contains strong language. 111 minutes.
Ty Burr is the author of the movie recommendation newsletter Ty Burr’s Watch List at tyburrswatchlist.com.
