The first few scenes of Tuesday are a bit of an ordeal. A shadowy creature stalks a dying man as the whispers and shrieks of countless souls in agony echo and resound. One after another, we see the stricken faces of dying individuals as the apparition approaches and extends its wings, snuffing out life. When we finally get a look at this demonic executioner, it appears almost familiar. Is that just an abnormally large and filthy parrot? This is the knife-edge of Tuesday‘s extraordinary pathos: the darkness is alloyed with whimsy in the most unexpected and affecting ways, leavening the film’s existential inquiry into the biggest questions of all–“Does God exist? Is there an afterlife?” Among the many surprising twists and turns, these questions actually get answered by the end of the film.
Directing her first feature film and working from her own script, Daina Oniunas-Pusić centers the story around an adolescent girl, Tuesday (Lola Petticrew), who is bedridden and dying from an unspecified disease. Despite that set-up, the film isn’t a lugubrious bedside vigil. Tuesday is pretty and charming, as befits a good protagonist, but more consequentially, she has a knack for helping people calm down and easing their own pain. “Breathe in, breathe out,” she counsels. Maybe she developed this skill out of necessity, since her mother, Zora (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), is such a thorny tangle of angst and self-absorption. The first twist takes place when the Death Parrot arrives to dispatch with Tuesday, but the girl distracts him with a corny joke. That manages to quiet for a moment the shrieks of anguish in his head. He relaxes and sees the world around him as if for the first time in a long time. No one is more surprised than Death himself.
Thus begins a strange companionship between the dying girl and the feathered Grim Reaper. The bird is genuinely terrifying in appearance, with goat-like eyes, filthy plumage and a black scimitar of a beak, not to mention his gravelly croak of a voice (Arinzé Kene). He is able to grow as big as a house or as tiny as an earwig since his role is to deal death to all creatures great and small, operating at their scale. When Zora lashes out in a protective frenzy, she derails the bird’s mission and interrupts the entire cycle of life and death on Earth. It turns out, all you need to do that is a heavy medical textbook, some matches and a muted gag reflex.
What would actually happen if death no longer existed? What might seem like a miracle of eternal life for all quickly turns into a horrifying tableau of misery: immortal flies infest everything, buzzing in black clouds over the cities that throng with the wails of the sick and wounded who just can’t die. A man who lost his legs in a construction accident drags himself along the road, screaming. A headless bird bashes itself against a window, unable to put itself out of its misery. Life is what hurts; death, it turns out, is relief from it. “She needs to die,” the parrot says of Tuesday, but her mother doesn’t appreciate the wisdom of that until death is no longer an option.
This might all land too heavily if not for a beautifully nuanced performance from Louis-Dreyfus, who is astonishing. A gifted comic, she invests every syllable, gesture and tic with meaning. She’s goofy and playful, but only in a way that seems to mask a great deal of pain. The script smartly avoids unnecessary exposition; we gather from a collection of scenes that Zora has quit her job but doesn’t use her freed-up schedule to spend time with her dying daughter. Instead, she continues to leave home every day to sit in a daze on a park bench feeling sorry for herself, or to sell knick-knacks at the pawnshop to supplement her dwindling finances. The unspoken truth about Zora is that she’s experiencing her daughter’s impending death as a Zora problem: Why is this happening to me? Zora’s self-involvement is both relatable and ugly, and channels a lot of wisdom about the power of grief to turn people into knots. This all plays out in Louis-Dreyfus’s micro-expressions, and in the desperate ways she attempts to wrench laughs out of her expiring daughter.
In an early scene, we witness Zora haggling with a shopkeeper, and her instinct for negotiation plays a crucial role later in the film when the stakes are much higher. Once Death is back in business, his earlier assertion remains true: Tuesday needs to die. There’s something comforting about thinking of Death as a grumpy parrot who appreciates a joke and needs a little peace and quiet from time to time. And, because he’s a parrot, he likes to replay some choice tidbits of things folks said earlier, to hold them to account. He doesn’t make deals, but he does offer up some secrets about the nature of the universe and the meaning of existence. Like the short fiction of Etgar Keret and Samanta Schweblin, Tuesday gleefully addresses these deep questions with equal doses of the surreal and the sincere. The film ends in a very different place from where it began, even as the eternal cycle of life and death gets rolling again. As for the question of God and the Afterlife, the parrot confirms one and denies the other, but to sort that out, you’ll need to wait until Tuesday.
Photo courtesy of A24
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