The debut feature by Croatian director Daina O. Pusić seems purposely designed to throw the viewer off-guard. A ratty CG parrot with wolf-like attributes encounters humans in various states of distress, after which the action cuts to an American woman named Zora (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) sitting impatiently in her nice London home waiting for someone—a young nurse (Leah Harvey), as it turns out. There’s another quick cut to a taxidermist’s shop where Zora tries to sell the proprietor a set of stuffed rats done up as Catholic bishops. What is going on here? Eventually, the action returns to the house and Zora’s bedridden teenage daughter Tuesday (Lola Petticrew), who we quickly learn is dying from some wasting disease after the parrot shows up and she realizes his purpose. “Please don’t kill me,” she pleads. “I must,” he replies in a guttural voice. 

Cinematic fantasies about confronting death are not uncommon, but Pusić’s approach feels almost improvisational. Louis-Dreyfus’s characteristically anxious comic effect masks Zora’s underlying despair, and Tuesday’s negotiations with Death the bird (voiced by Arinzé Kene) involve the cleaning of centuries of soot and grime from his feathers, the playing of Ice Cube’s “It Was a Good Day” (a song Death admits he has always liked), and the sharing of medical THC via vape cartridge. “I love sarcasm,” the bird says at one point after Tuesday makes a joke, and he grants her a brief delay from her descent into eternal nothingness, but only so that she can prepare her mother for it. By this point, the viewer has realized that Zora’s actions are all in the service of her full-on denial of Tuesday’s fate, and the movie becomes a kind of battle of wills regarding what it means to “let go.” Pusić maintains the surreal tone with magical bits showing an apocalypse taking place out in the real world, characters changing size for no discernible reason, and Zora herself becoming an angel of death upon acquiring the bird’s powers through literal ingestion. The random quality of these story details turns them into non sequiturs, making it difficult to grasp the director’s intentions, even when, in the end, Zora comes to terms with her own fears after Death tells her that the only afterlife for Tuesday is “in your memory.”

As someone who doesn’t believe in the afterlife, I found this pronouncement to be weak tea, especially after sitting through such fantastical audio-visual exertions. Perhaps the movie requires more than a single viewing to appreciate the odd allegorical richness of Pusić’s ideas, but they felt undercooked to me; which isn’t to say Tuesday isn’t moving. Louis-Dreyfus ably embodies the heartbreaking reality of Zora’s refusal to accept that her daughter is going to die very soon. “What am I without you?” she asks, and all the otherworldly stylistic inventions constructed by Pusić fall to the wayside in the light of Zora’s incomprehension. Louis-Dreyfus alone carries the terror and conviction that the movie struggles so hard to convey. 

Opens April 4 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).

Tuesday home page in Japanese

photo (c) Death on a Tuesday LLC/The British Film Institute/British Broadcasting Corporation 2024