Here is another film that ponders the big life-or-death existential questions, in the grand cinematic tradition of 1946’s A Matter Of Life And Death or, say, 1990’s Ghost. Tuesday, the ambitious debut feature from Croatian filmmaker Daina O. Pusić, in fact bears most similarities to 2016’s A Monster Calls: as with J.A. Bayona’s tear-jerking drama, this is a devastatingly moving fairy tale about a gravelly voiced, anthropomorphised fantasy character making friends with a human grappling with the terminal illness of a family member. Unlike that film, this comes from A24 and is decidedly made for adults rather than children, being distinctly, deliciously oddball.
It begins with a montage of people about to die. Cheerful stuff. Facing their end, this cavalcade of poor souls beg for mercy from Death, who takes an unlikely form: a shapeshifting CG macaw parrot, voiced by British actor Arinzé Kene (Connor from EastEnders). Who needs a cloak and scythe? Less a grim reaper than a reluctant one, Death does his duties wearily and sorrowfully, as the living continually reject the inevitable.
Then Death arrives at the door of Tuesday (Lola Petticrew), a young woman with a never-named terminal illness. She manages to stave off her demise by distracting Death with a long-winded dad joke about penguins, and offers a helping hand when Death starts to get a panic attack. Meanwhile, Tuesday’s mother Zora (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) is nowhere to be seen, trying to sell novelty rats to a taxidermist (the film’s themes of mortality, grief and letting go elegantly presented in microcosm).
This is a thoughtful and idiosyncratic film, beautifully acted and only slightly too long. While it keeps a sense of gallows humour running throughout — the phrase “furiously masturbating” pops up in the script at least once — it is also deeply poignant: a sad story about how dying can be harder for the grievers, the people left in the aftermath, wallowing in the negative space.
But it is also — in a way that the film’s schmaltzy marketing did not quite suggest — extremely weird. Pusić strikes a curious tone that is part philosophical musing, part family character drama, part daffy surrealist fantasy. Not even a horseman of the apocalypse would have seen its mid-way twist coming, arriving just as the pace threatens to dip. Julia Louis-Dreyfus is the ideal casting for this unique tonal gumbo: she brings a hint of Veep’s Selina Meyer to Zora in her inappropriate jokes and awkward presence. But she also injects the film with devastating pathos, culminating in a finale that will entirely break your heart in two. Death is as inevitable as taxes, but there is nothing inevitable in how Tuesday plays out.