"Tuesday"

  ☆☆☆½ 

Too many movies barely have enough ideas to sustain a scene, much less a full-length feature film, so it seems a little unfair to fault Tuesday for cramming too much into its 111 minutes.

There is so much that works so well in this film, a true flight of fancy that manages the impressive feat of grafting a magical fantasy onto a grounded story of death, grief and denial. In an unexpected dramatic turn (not her first, though you'd never know that from the marketing, though her first that's this aggressively downbeat), Julia Louis-Dreyfus gets a lot of credit for helping the audience navigate some tough transitions between human drama and increasingly surreal fantasy.

She plays Zora, the mother of a terminally ill 15-year-old named Tuesday, who is played perfectly by Lola Petticrew, a performer nearly twice the age of the character. Lola knows she will die of her unnamed disease, and Zora is in utter denial—not just of her daughter's mortality, but of the ways it has forced her to change her life as a single mother in London.

Lola is certain of her impending death because she's been told to expect it by none other than Death itself, in the form of a filth-covered macaw who can shrink to the size of a pea or grow to the height of a giant, and whose eternal job it is to appear to the doomed and cause their demise. The macaw speaks in a gruff, low voice, which is memorably provided by Arinzé Kent.

But Zora is not about to allow Death to take Tuesday, and when the bird presents itself to her and says, "Madame, you need to say goodbye to your daughter," Zora makes a dramatic and violent decision. What she does propels the rest of the film, and takes place against an odd and malevolent backdrop. Even as Tuesday and Zora grapple with the mother's decision, the world they live in seems headed for an apocalypse.

This long middle stretch is where Tuesday tries so hard, and so admirably, to show us the unexpected. It's a shame to say that not everything it tries works, that some of its oddities come across as truly puzzling and often confusing, while others offer up metaphors that don't quite hit their marks.

Tuesday is the rare film that could have benefitted from more screen time, but for its valiant effort and for the astonishing vision of writer-director Diana O. Pusic, it deserves to be seen and even cherished. Not many films try this hard. Tuesday doesn't always fly, but when it does, it soars.

Viewed June 16, 2024 — Laemmle NoHo

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