A Giant Talking Bird Is No Match for Julia Louis-Dreyfus in ‘Tuesday’

For as much as studies of grief and death have been twisted and mangled into trite gimmicks in the genre films of late, it’s rare to see a manifestation of the reaper that doesn’t come in the form of some horrific demon or protracted paranoia. Toni Collette’s grief got her family sucked into a cult in Hereditary; Natalie Portman grappled with her husband’s disappearance by venturing into a mutated Earth in Annihilation; sorrow was even portrayed as the literal Boogeyman in last summer’s lazy film of the same name. And, of course, there was the top-hatted apparition in The Babadook, the film from the past decade that’s easiest to point to when examining the abstract ways in which grief can be portrayed in cinema.

But in Tuesday, the feature film debut from writer-director Daina O. Pusić, death appears in the form of something much more unusual: a mutating, talking macaw (voiced by Arinzé Kene). This strangely beautiful vision of Death flies around the world, killing every living being—from house flies to humans—when their time comes. In the film, Death arrives at the home of Zora (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and her terminally ill teenage daughter, Tuesday (Lola Petticrew), who suffers from an unspecified illness that keeps her in chronic pain. Death assumes that helping Tuesday pass on will be business as usual, but both her bright spirit and appreciation for the world stop him in his tracks. Before long, the world’s balance is thrown out of whack, and when Zora further intervenes to save her daughter’s life, Tuesday morphs into something as truly fantastical as it is frustrating.

At the top of the film, we meet Zora after she leaves Tuesday for the day, at home in their London flat with a visiting nurse (Leah Harvey). (When the nurse’s caller ID pops up as “Nurse 8” on the phone, Pusić cleverly doles out plenty of exposition with just one quick frame.) Zora visits a taxidermy shop where she tries to pawn off a collection of four stuffed rats, dressed as different members of the Vatican. An off-color joke to the shop owner lands with a thud, and we come to understand how Zora is handling her daughter’s declining health. Pusić balances a penchant for brash humor with Zora’s feeling that she’s dragging despair alongside her all day. Her crude jokes are little attempts at coping, ones she doesn’t even realize she’s making.

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