Tuesday (Oniunas-Pusic, 2023)

Tuesday is sort of a mash-up of The Seventh Seal and A Monster Calls, only death is a giant parrot who, instead of playing chess, does some grief therapy. Also, the relationship between the dying and the grieving is inverted from A Monster Calls, with the mother struggling to process the death of her child rather than vice-versa.

The film is every bit as weird as the description makes it sound, but the style too often stands out for its own sake rather than serving the narrative, so its emotional punches never land with the same gut-wrenching force as they do in the best mortality movies.

Or maybe that is just for me. Death movies tend to have a lot to do with when one sees them. I have seen and heard from some folks who were deeply touched by the film, and I understand that reaction even if I did not share it. By going the magical realism route, writer/director Daina Oniunas-Pusic does defamiliarize some heavily trod ground. And allowing death to bargain with the fatally ill teenager does nudge the film more in the direction of being about grieving rather than just dying.

Speaking of bargaining, there is a Kübler-Ross structure to the whole enterprise that may help or hurt the film depending on how subtle the viewer finds it. The opening scene is a pawn shop, and it shows mom (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss) literally bargaining when she first mentions her dying child. Since parrots are supposed to only echo what we say, the introduction to this emblem of death, with his repetition,starts as cruelly indifferent. But when Tuesday (Lola Petticrew) does him a kindness, she receives the extended (if not indefinite) time that so many terminal patients ask for.

Dreyfuss is being touted as the primary reason to see the film, and she is quite good, even if her being so is no longer the huge surprise that A24’s marketing wants to pretend it is. Yes, it’s been over twenty-five years since the end of Seinfeld, and she has done more work in its aftermath than she did before it. Her work here is solid, but hardly revolutionary. The early scenes of brittle anger evoked Mary Tyler Moore in Ordinary People, another performance that was slightly overpraised because of who was giving it.

None of this is a scathing indictment of the film, nor is any of it meant to be. It is a sensitive, serious take on an important but difficult topic., so variance of personal responses is to be expected. Artistically, it is competently and carefully put together. I just was not particularly moved by it.