Tuesday (Lola Petticrew) is a teenage girl diagnosed with cancer and spends her days at home or in the garden with her nurse, Billie (Leah Harvey).  Her mother, Zora (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), spends most of the day out of the house and spends punishingly little time with her daughter because she cannot bear to see her in this condition.  One morning, Death (Arinzé Kene), in the shape of a parrot, comes to Tuesday but the girl begs and pleads for a little more time so that her mother can be there when she passes. 

Daina Oniunas-Pusic writes and directs Tuesday, an existential drama released by A24 after its debut at the 2023 edition of the Telluride Film Festival.  Running 111 minutes, the film charts the fraught and fractured relationship of a single mother and her dying child and the incredible range of impossible and unfathomable emotions that come with it on both sides of the aisle.  Her introduction of Death personified by an ancient bird lends a sense of whimsy to the film, but this flair does not betray the human story that thrives at the heart of this tender narrative.  

While Louis-Dreyfus has the name recognition to help market the indie film – and delivers a wild performance in her own right – the film truly belongs to the titular Tuesday.  Petticrew has a near impossible task of emotionally interacting with all of the special effects in the film while physically seated in her wheelchair for nearly the entire runtime when not tucked into bed, and further, her face is obscured by her bookish large-framed glasses and the tube from her oxygen machine.  That she can take Oniunas-Pusic’s admittedly-at-times cliché riddled dialogue and give it such a pure and lustrous shine is nothing short of incredible.  Beyond the emotional traps of watching a young person die from disease, Petticrew is not content to let the situation drive her performance and she still delivers an emotional account of a daughter in desperate need of a friend and of a mother.  It is this expansion of the themes of grief that allows Tuesday not to get bogged down in the subgenre of trauma porn, but actually tell a story with a glimmer of hope about it, even as it peddles in these absolutely tragic circumstances.  

Opposite Petticrew for much of the first act is Death, an ancient parrot covered in scars and dirt, with the ability to grow and shrink in size. Taking the form of an animal unlocks a bit of empathy within audiences almost immediately, but retaining his birdlike tendencies can also set that same audience at unease given the bird’s sharp beak and talons in addition to his haggard appearance. This is the kind of bold, creative choice that either makes or breaks a film for an audience and because it is so thoughtfully employed, Kene’s voice performance – animated by ReDefine – should be able to take root. Kene provides a performance that needs to be profound as his character has existed, essentially, since the dawn of time though perhaps not always in this form; the film does not let lore get in the way of its philosophy. He is both tender and stern, warmed for the first time in a long time, by compassion when Tuesday draws a bath in the sink for him to wash his feathers. 

As for Louis-Dreyfus, she is burdened with a tonally broad character at times providing humor only to quickly oscillate to a more traditionally dramatic sequence in the next scene, followed by one that touches against the not-quite-fair-to-call-it-absurd aspects of the film.  She does her best with a part that is asking her to do too much, and had Oniunas-Pusic only asked her to do two of these three things, any two, the film would feel a little more complete and singular.  As is, Tuesday, especially when looking at Louis-Dreyfus’ performance feels ever-so-slightly underbaked simply because it is interested in so many different things and does not allow the time to explore it as deeply as the other themes and plot devices.   

This is most evident in the middle section of the film when Zora is in the throws of learning her lesson that time is fleeting and she has precious little of it left to share with Tuesday which coincides with some of the stranger aspects of the film that can cause a hesitant audience to put up their guard.  The change happens in one of the more upsetting scenes of an already upsetting film when Zora attacks Death, smashing the bird with a textbook, and then lighting it on fire before eating its head.  It is shockingly violent, but it is the perfect way to show us as an audience that Zora does love her daughter and will do anything she can to protect her, even if she has a hard time showing that intention to us, or to Tuesday. Oniunas-Pusic rebounds the tone quickly enough and that we are watching the immediate aftermath of this event with a little distrust honestly helps to put us in the right headspace for what comes next.  With Death inside of her, Zora is now able to grow or shrink to incredible sizes and is burdened with the task of delivering souls.  Since she chooses to stay home to be with Tuesday, no one, no matter the pain of their injuries or illness, are afforded the reprieve of death until the mother/daughter pair finally embark on a journey to relieve them of their pain and contend with when Death will ultimately return for Tuesday. 

Tuesday is one of those films that is wonderful to watch, but almost impossible to recommend. Oniunas-Pusic meets these uncomfortable and distressing themes head-on in a narrative wrapped in magic realism that would remind audiences of a similarly bold Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022) in which director George Miller investigates the unending power of love through the relationship of an ancient genie and a bookish symbologist. It is not uncommon for cinema to employ visual metaphor to discuss, interrogate, and learn from its themes, but so often this type of exploration is confined to the wide reaches of the horror genre where Death – or grief which is more in vogue – would take on a more monstrous form. Oniunas-Pusic instead opts to present her version of death as something beautiful, and though that narrative is something so uniquely specific, it still allows its audience to graft their own experience onto that of the characters thereby fostering empathy, because Death, unfortunately, touches us all.