Writer/director Daina O. Pusić comes up with a unique way to represent the embodiment of death in her debut feature Tuesday, but a unique idea is not necessarily the same as a good idea. Here, Death is a size-changing parrot with a voice that sounds like Inspector Gadget's nemesis Dr. Claw, which may not be something you can see in any other movie, but it isn't really something you want to see in this movie, either.
There are lots of other bad ideas in Tuesday, which is a mess of conflicting tones and genres. The best thing that can be said about it is that Pusić delivers all of her terrible ideas with conviction. She begins, ambitiously, by traversing the entire globe, pulling the camera back to reveal the Earth contained entirely in the eye of Death the parrot, who is in turn perched in the corner of a dying man's eye. Death (voiced by Arinzé Kene) can shrink himself down to a tiny enough size to fit in that crevice, but he grows to larger than human size when he sends the man off to his eternal rest.
Death is constantly bombarded by the thoughts of the dying, rushing from one person's final moments to another, but he's somehow tripped up when he arrives to grimly reap Tuesday (Lola Petticrew), a plucky teenager dying of an unspecified Movie Disease. Tuesday tells Death a corny joke, and that inspires him to speak for the first time in ages. Tuesday just wants a chance to say goodbye to her mother Zora (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) before she goes, so Death agrees to hang out for a while, smoke some marijuana and rap along to Ice Cube's "It Was a Good Day."
Tuesday lurches from abstract metaphysical musings to goofy buddy comedy, and that's before Zora even gets home, after which it becomes a horror movie for a little bit, then expands into apocalyptic science fiction, all while delivering a heavy-handed, tear-jerking message about coping with grief and letting go of loved ones who are suffering. It's somehow both maudlin and creepy, as Death's holiday with Tuesday and Zora carries horrific consequences for the rest of the world, even if mother and daughter remain willfully oblivious. "Is this the apocalypse?" asks Tuesday's traumatized home health care nurse (Leah Harvey), but even Pusić doesn't seem to know for sure.
It's not easy to roll with all of those narrative shifts while maintaining a consistent, grounded character, and Louis-Dreyfus can't quite pull it off, especially when Zora undergoes her own mystical transformation of sorts. Although she's still primarily known for comedy, Louis-Dreyfus has demonstrated a skill for tackling dramatic material in her collaborations with filmmaker Nicole Holofcener (Enough Said, You Hurt My Feelings), but here she just seems lost.
Both Louis-Dreyfus' performance and the movie around her recall the recent Adam Sandler-starring oddity Spaceman, which had a giant spider instead of a giant parrot, but was an equally muddled meditation on grief and regret. Like Sandler in that movie, Louis-Dreyfus conveys sadness by dialing down her typically lively presence, and the result is dour and glum rather than affecting.
Petticrew plays a typical precocious teenager, the child who's had to take on the burdens of maturity, but she almost never captures the pain and anguish of a terminal illness, remaining sunny and beatific until the very end. She's no more believable as someone on the verge of death than the protagonists of YA illness romances like Midnight Sun and Five Feet Apart. Pusić works hard to pull on the audience's heartstrings as Tuesday implores her mother to move on, but the emotions feel manufactured and phony.
The parrot himself is an impressive special effect, at least, which helps immerse the audience in the world that Pusić is creating. The larger world-building is haphazard, though, and the movie falters when Pusić attempts to depict the concrete effects of Death's distractions. The story can only succeed as a metaphor, and any reminder of the lack of internal logic takes the viewer out of the experience.
If Tuesday ever evokes any genuine emotion, it's only in spite of the fractured storytelling. Pusić's grand vision is a complete misfire, but there's some honesty in the small, intimate moments. No terrifying mystical creature required. ♦
Tuesday
