Tuesday presents death in a somewhat different light. Instead of the usual appearance of a shrouded, skeleton figure, this Grim Reaper takes on the shape of a scruffy, dirty parrot who also seems to be half-dead. Each victim’s final words summon death, which moves reluctantly from one to the next.
Those words never cease, playing in Death’s brain like continual white noise, until one day Death appears to murder Tuesday (Lola Petticrew), a terminally sick adolescent whose lungs are ready to fail. Tuesday, realizing she is looking Death in the face, pauses his creepy approach with a joke about a vehicle load of penguins. Death laughs, and the voices are quiet. Daina O. Pusić makes her directorial debut with an unusual, charming, and enchantingly bizarre film.
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Tuesday strikes a delicate balance between poignant and mawkish, a sophisticated and high-concept picture of a mother’s sorrow that sometimes borders on the adorable. But because of Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s completely committed performance, Tuesday manages to transcend its relatively flimsy concept.
Louis-Dreyfus plays Zora, Tuesday’s distraught mother, who spends her days pawning all of her things to pay for medical bills. However, the situation has grown intolerable, and Zora has transformed into a prickly, harsh woman who harshly orders Tuesday’s nurse (Leah Harvey) about and ignores Tuesday’s wordless pleas for attention.
As Zora goes on about her day, Tuesday eventually gets her mother’s attention by revealing that she would die that night. When Death, who had spent the day bonding with Tuesday, comes in front of Zora, she does what any desperate mother would do: she murders and eats him.
Killing Death has predictable effects, such as apocalyptic half-dead corpses and locust plagues, but Tuesday isn’t interested. Instead, it focuses on Zora and Tuesday, who spend the day rebuilding their strained relationship after so many years of coping with Tuesday’s sickness.
Even while Zora tenderly cares for her baby, washing her, taunting her, and playing word games with her, she is just avoiding the unpleasant truth. As the illusion begins to shatter and the truth of Zora’s actions for Tuesday becomes clear, Tuesday takes an even crazier turn: Zora becomes Death itself.
Despite its bizarre twists and turns (one of which involves Louis-Dreyfus inflating up to the size of a titan), he never loses sight of the primary bond between Zora and him. Louis-Dreyfus is fantastic in the role: furious, unlikable, and achingly sensitive as a mother who has built her whole life around her daughter and resents it.
However, her plight (apart from murdering and eating death) is painfully understood, even if her selfish acts endanger the whole universe. Awful people may still mourn, and Louis-Dreyfus plays this theme up with more depth than you would imagine. Lola Petticrew does an admirable job as the resentful girl who realizes her time is running out. But Kene is the unexpected star as death’s voice, delivering a snarling, methodical performance with a voice so low and deep it seems like it’s coming from the depths of hell.
Tuesday, with its tiny cast, might seem a bit constrained at times, and it’s clear that it’s a Covid production. Despite the layers of pain it unpacks during its weird, meandering trip, Tuesday seems like it has gotten the most out of its key connection at the conclusion of its runtime.
Zora and Tuesday live just for a few days, and we don’t learn anything about them before embarking on this strange journey. Although Pusi’s strong direction and Alexis Zabé’s soft, hazy cinematography suggest a more experienced director, the film’s major flaw—its writing—indicates that a first-time director was in charge.
Nonetheless, Tuesday’s vast, cosmic goals and modest, personal stakes combine to create a delightful, whimsical mixture that doesn’t linger too long. Even if its sweetness sometimes borders on the cloying, Tuesday’s one-of-a-kind portrayal of bereavement is poignant.
