Those of us movie critics fortunate enough to be in this line of work are always trying to squeeze another two hours or so out of the week to catch one more new film. Because you never know. Which is to say: I’m extremely happy to have seen “Tuesday,” which demands and receives new and challenging things from Julia Louis-Dreyfus while announcing a formidable new filmmaker, the Croatian writer-director Daina O. Pusić. She has created an imperfect but singular fairy tale for adults, but not just adults, really. There’s real magic and deep feeling behind it.
Allow me to describe it deceptively. “Tuesday” is the name of the 15-year-old girl using a wheelchair, hooked up to IVs, in the care of a home nurse while the girl’s mother works. Even when she’s not working, the mother, Zora, played by Louis-Dreyfus, doesn’t spend much meaningful time with her girl. Tuesday is dying. Zora isn’t coping well. Grief has a way of arriving before a loved one dies, and Zora’s grief has thrown her into a nervous whirlwind of busyness and chatter.
Now for the fantastical aspect of “Tuesday.” The first character we meet in Pusić’s story is a macaw, in fact a Macaw of Death. (The bird, which can radically size-shift from teeny-tiny to halfway-to-Kong size, is billed in the credits simply as “Death.”) With a brief, calm wave of its wing, Death brings the end to humans whose laments Death has heard, and will heed. This grubby but remarkable bird, badly in need of a bath and some peace, has a difficult time tuning out Earth’s perpetual chorus of lamentation.
Now it’s Tuesday’s time, her breathing having grown increasingly labored. The macaw arrives in Zora’s London townhouse at the appropriate time. (Death can speak, by the way; Nigerian born actor Arinzé Kene provides the unearthly-deep but surprisingly companionable voice characterization.)
For a time, Tuesday and Death find solace in each other’s temporary company. Shrinking down, the macaw enjoys a badly needed bath in Tuesday’s bathroom sink. Tuesday plays one of her favorite songs, Ice Cube’s “It Was a Good Day,” which turns out to be a favorite of Death’s, too. They get high, in a scene not played for the kind of laugh you might expect, even from an off-center, A24-distributed picture.
Early on we see Zora bartering with a taxidermist, trying to sell a couple of stuffed rats, so we know money is tight for this woman, because dying is expensive. “Tuesday” phases into a darker, wilder hue once Zora meets the macaw, and does everything she can — including swallowing the bird whole! — to prolong her daughter’s life a bit longer, even if Zora hasn’t yet used the time they have especially wisely. Meantime an apocalypse, glimpsed in a few brief images, rages all over London, and presumably elsewhere.
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