Death is a terrifying certainty to deal with from many sides of the spectrum — from those who feel it breathing down their necks to the others bracing themselves for feeling the profound sense of absence. For the early part of writer-director Daina O. Pusić’s ‘Tuesday,’ there’s a view from the eyes of Death itself straight from an immortal, growing in size macaw (voiced by Arinzé Kene), once lush with color and now covered with dirt, downtrodden, and inundated by voices calling out to it to help people usher them to the other side. Despite how heavy the job is and how angry those near Death can be (one lady spits on the macaw), there’s a gentleness in which it meets its subjects, leading to their end. There are certain non-stop “places to go, souls to take” cadences that come with this responsibility — until the macaw comes across one family.
Tuesday (Lola Petticrew) is a 15-year-old terminally ill with cancer trying to manage the day-to-day as best as she can. Her mother, Zora (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), actively disassociates with any thought that her daughter will no longer be her. It’s to the point where she’s selling belongings for treatments and going to the park for long strides of time to avoid going home. Much of Tuesday’s human interaction is with her nurse, Willow (Ellie James). When Willow interacts with Zora, she tries to be the person of reason, imploring Zora to spend time with her daughter – to no avail. Out of sight, out of mind. Things change when Death comes for Tuesday, and they both gain something from the meeting they don’t expect. Tuesday somehow barters with Death to allow her to say goodbye to her mother. Inadvertently hanging out with her, Death can quiet the loud voices and enjoy itself. (They both at one point rap Ice Cube’s “Today Was A Good Day.”)
Photo Credit: A24
But then the time arrives when Zora is confronted with the personification of what she fears the most and acts just like any rational person would – attacking the macaw (there’s a physical manifestation of bottling up grief from the inside). From there, the film goes down a fantastical, almost biblical plague-like path. What happens to the world at large when you get rid of Death? There’s talk of zombie cows and people screaming out in agony, not being able to pass away. It’s okay that there is a lot of ambiguity concerning some plot elements (why a macaw?) because ‘Tuesday’ works on a level where the audience gets dropped in. But there are some fascinating plot threads it discards by the wayside while telling the story of a mother learning to let go. Louis-Dreyfus gives a beautifully conflicted performance as someone you can identify with as a parent. The story should (in theory) always be that children should outlive their parents. It’s a terrifying prospect even to contemplate that it can play out in reverse. At the heart of this story, the emotions that Petticrew and Louis-Dreyfus play out on screen once everything quiets down are the most effective — the big heart-to-heart and the acknowledgment that the end is coming and the start for one of them is going to be weird and melancholy. It’s a universal theme that has been commonplace in films tackling this issue.
When Pusić takes the big swings reminiscent of a fable, the film loses its connective tissue. What begins as a discussion on why Death is in the natural order of things through this mythical figure falls away because it has to be looped back into this small story. ‘Tuesday’ takes a long way to arrive at the same conclusion we’ve come to expect. There was another path to deconstructing the concept of Death and chronicling a tragic story of saying goodbye to a loved one that didn’t entirely take advantage of all its big ideas.
