TUESDAY — Fruitcake Enterprises

Directing: B+
Acting: A-
Writing: A-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+
Special Effects: B+

It can be astonishing when something comes along that is utterly original, unlike anything you have ever seen before—sometimes, to the point that it comes close to inexplicable. Since when does Death manifest itself as a deep, scratchy-throated parrot, anyway? Ever since Daina Oniunas-Pusic thought to write and direct Tuesday, I guess.

Maybe it’s just that the black cloaked figure with a scythe has long since played out. Tuesday offers no explanation whatsoever as to the use of a parrot instead, but rather, presents him as a character with challenges and internal struggles like anyone else. Not even that is a particularly novel approach, but how it gets contextualized here certainly is.

Death can be tiny, and he can grow to a giant size, a detail that becomes a surprising plot point later on in the film. When we first see him, he is so tiny he is nestled into the corner of a man’s eye, something we don’t even realize for the few seconds it takes the camera to pan out. This is part of an opening montage that makes it quite unclear what the tone of the film is going to be, in which we see Death release random people around the world from their pain, waving his wing over them.

I had a peculiar experience with this film on a number of fronts. I never saw a trailer for Tuesday, and chose to go see it based on a fairly high MetaCritic score of 70, and a brief synopsis I found both odd and compelling: a mother and teenage daughter must confront Death when it arrives in the form of a talking bird. That honestly sounds a bit whimsical, possibly bordering on corny, but late-career Julia Louis-Dreyfus has made some very interesting choices, tending to be in movie projects that are both a bit off the beaten path and reliably entertaining.

All that said, when Tuesday opened on a shot of Earth from outer space and the ominous sounds of countless people longing for death, shifting between voices like the movement of a radio dial, for a minute I wondered if I had gone into the wrong theater. Is this a horror movie? Not quite. Is it a comedy? Definitely not, even though it has a through line of irreverence that gives it several genuinely funny moments. Is it ultimately a tear jerker? Definitely yes, but still in a way that leaves Tuesday a movie that defies categorization. It’s sort of a sad mood piece with a surprising amount of humor. You don’t see that every day.

“Tuesday” is actually the title character, the terminally ill teenage girl played by Lola Petticrew, who Death (voiced by Arinzé Kene) is summoned to visit by the sounds of her wheezing, evidently indicating that tonight is her time. But rather than freaking out when the bird appears on the table in her backyard, Tuesday suddenly launches into a joke, an earnestly cute one that involves penguins in the back of a car and actually made me laugh. (I did wonder how that would play on rewatch, when the punch line is already known.)

Death is disarmed by this, which causes him to hesitate, and then agree to wait until Zora, Tuesday’s mother, gets home.

This is where Julia Louis-Dreyfus comes in, as she is perfectly cast in the role, which becomes more significant as the story plays out. She is more than anything what makes Tuesday worth seeing. Ultimately, Tuesday is a movie about accepting the inevitability and ubiquity of death. It just uses a wild premise and some very odd turns to get us there, a journey you might have mixed feelings about on the way but in the end you’ll be glad you went on.

Given how low the budget for Tuesday clearly was, Daina Oniunas-Pusic does a lot with very little, focusing most of the movie on all of two characters, with one supporting character, an in-house nurse (Leah Harvey) as a third who comes and goes. Oniunas-Pusic manages to use subtle cues and sparingly used special effects to render the apocalyptic consequences when Death is taken out of commission for a while—thanks to some jarringly inventive tactics on the part of Zora, who cannot cope. In a way, Tuesday is a demonstration that our very universe does not work if death does not happen in it.

As is often the case, it’s the terminally ill person who accepts their fate, and the people who love them who cannot. When Zora meets Death, she isn’t freaked out by a magical bird so much as the knowledge that he is there to take her daughter away. Zora then quite understandably acts out of desperation, ultimately only prolonging the inevitable.

As odd as this movie is, I can see it being deeply moving to anyone who lost a loved one, particularly one gone before it should have been their time. It has far more depth and far more nuance than its simple premise might suggest. And Louis-Dreyfus gives a magnificent performance, by turns funny and heartbreaking. It may be a challenge to open your mind to it at first, but if you can manage it, you’ll be glad you did.