Tuesday: Fantastical Meaning-of-Life Drama Beats the Odds to Deliver Hope
By Kim Hughes
Rating: A
Audacious doesn’t begin to describe Tuesday, the feature directorial debut from Croatian-born Daina Oniunas-Pusić, which she wrote. It is also astonishingly tender and very human despite its fantastical premise, which rivals any superhero film for boldness of imagination yet summons uncommon emotional heft.
Tuesday is also very difficult to summarize without giving away too much plot or, frankly, reducing the film’s captivating allure to simple words on the page. But here goes.
In the film, death lives in the form of a shapeshifting talking macaw, voiced by Arinzé Kene. One day, it arrives at the home of profoundly ill 15-year-old teenager Tuesday (Lola Petticrew), who lives with her American single mom Zora (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) in the UK.
The sick but effervescent Tuesday intuits the bird’s mission, but its delivery is delayed as she and Death chat about music and other ephemera, awaiting Zora’s arrival home. Zora is not dealing well with Tuesday’s situation, and is constantly seeking ways to avoid confronting reality.
As the trailer shows, Death reveals itself to Zora. What the trailer doesn’t show — and what becomes the engine of the narrative — is what Zora does with the news, and how that brings her closer both to Tuesday and to the meaning of life and death.
One of the most interesting things about Tuesday is its vast constellation of possible reference points. I found myself thinking about how psychedelic drugs have helped terminally ill patients cope with impending death by somehow letting them better see their place in the broader universe, as so eloquently detailed by Michael Pollan in his 2018 book, How to Change Your Mind.
I don’t know if Oniunas-Pusić considered that when she was writing her phantasmagoric tale, but it’s as good a metaphor as any for the existential dilemma of death, and how we gauge our meaning against it.
Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal might also be a reference point here, and theologians can no doubt excavate all manner of religious symbolism from the film’s genuinely out-there turn of events which, I promise, you have not seen before and will not see coming.
And yet in the end, it’s also just about a mother losing her daughter against the backdrop of knowing we all die eventually. What we leave behind is what matters, the film says, not how long it takes us to achieve it before the end. Simple, yet not so simple.
Tuesday is lovely, and beautifully executed, and its excellent cast — which includes Leah Harvey as Tuesday’s savvy in-home nurse — are extraordinarily committed to their roles. Even so, it’s difficult to recommend the film across the board as it does require significant suspension of disbelief. And I suspect there will be those who feel manipulated by its naked sentimentality.
But for those who buy in, the payoff is far greater and longer lasting that any superhero film of comparable improbability. Then again, who among us really knows what death looks like?
And when you think about it, what could be weirder than the concept of death itself, where an entire lifetime’s worth of experience and wisdom and knowledge is simply extinguished in a flash? I’m still reckoning with that one, but watching this film helped.
Tuesday. Written and directed by Daina Oniunas-Pusić. Starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Lola Petticrew, Arinzé Kene and Leah Harvey. In theatres June 14.