Didn’t have death appearing as a bird that talks like Caesar from “Planet of the Apes” on the bingo card.
Voiced by Arinze Kene, Death comes in the form of a size-shifting parrot in “Tuesday,” and visits people across Earth in their final moments before they pass away. As the movie gets underway, the bird’s latest task is visiting the terminally ill teenage girl Tuesday (Lola Petticrew).
Tuesday speaks with Death though and the two form a sort of understanding, leading to an arrangement where the girl will be allowed to stay alive until her mother Zora (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) gets home to say goodbye. From there, the film presents a journey all about mortality for the characters.
A director taking a big swing for the fences is definitely admirable, and deserves some respect. That’s certainly the case with “Tuesday,” as Daina Oniunas-Pusic, in her feature debut as a director, made quite the bold picture. “Tuesday” covers a lot of heavy subject matter and does so in inventive, allegorical ways.
The sad thing is it doesn’t really work. There are plenty of films that nicely explore themes of mortality, death, spirituality and more. Some recent good examples include the grounded “Living” from 2022 and the more allegorical films “Mother” from 2017 and “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” from 2020.
Where those movies were able to explore issues of the human condition with engaging characters, tonal consistency and insightful writing, “Tuesday,” comes up short. The picture awkwardly zigzags from scene to scene in an incoherent way. It never manages to establish a good tone and the fantasy element ends up being poorly incorporated.
What could have been a moving film about a mother and daughter both coming to terms with the latter’s last days in the face of the grim reaper turns into an odd film that seems like it’s trying too hard to be weird and characters that come across as inauthentic. The other worldly elements feel needlessly over-the-top and the character interactions don’t emotionally land.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus is usually so reliable on screen, and she was great in last year’s “You Hurt My Feelings,” but her talents feel squandered here. She’s really giving it her all, but the material makes the character come across as improperly melodramatic.
Lola Petticrew has a similar case. In some of the more serious scenes, she’s quite good, but there are a lot of times where it feels like the script is making her character overly quirky. The mother-daughter relationship is also just really unconvincing.
The picture is also far too long. It’s one of those flicks that already feels like it’s being stretched too far, and then the film reaches a point where it should logically conclude, but keeps going. Some of the messaging regarding the subject matter can also come across as pretentious at times.
Again, one can appreciate a film that’s creative and to be fair, some of the metaphors at play are clever, but as a whole, “Tuesday” never really gels. A person can watch the music video for “Tha Crossroads” by Bone Thugs and get about the same experience. 1.5 out of 5.
Matthew Liedke on Film 
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