Film Review - Tuesday (2023)

It touches everybody – at a distance and more personally – yet death remains the last taboo, something we shy away from talking about. It’s even more acute when it involves the demise of a child: there’s something almost disruptive about an offspring dying before their parents, but it’s exactly what the mother at the centre of Daina O Pusic’s feature debut, Tuesday, has to look straight in the eye. Except she can’t.

Zora (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) simply cannot accept that her 15 year old, Tuesday (Lola Petticrew), is losing her life to a terminal condition. She’s given up her job but, instead of being her daughter’s carer, she pretends she’s at work every day and funds her nurse, Billie (Leah Harvey), by selling the contents of the upper floor of their house. As Tuesday’s illness worsens, she receives a visit from Death in the form of a shapeshifting macaw, but the girl distracts him from his mission and, when her mother discovers the bird, her reaction is extreme.

She will do anything to keep her daughter alive, yet this is a story set in a world where death isn’t just inevitable, it’s essential because the consequences are dire. By preventing Death from doing his job, Zora upsets the natural order of things, so that daily life is now full of prolonged suffering and decay, something that can only be restored when the bird resumes his duties. Described as a fantasy, Tuesday is more of a meditation on life and death, not a tear jerker in the style of All Of Us Strangers or A Monster Calls, but a story which comes from two viewpoints, that of the daughter and her mother.

It’s a film that will touch a nerve with anybody who’s experienced the death of somebody they love, regardless of the relationship or their respective ages, and is sufficiently mature to allow for everybody’s experience being different. Like they say, there’s no rule book for this. Yet, alongside of the literally fantastic side of the story, the bird especially, there’s a sense that what we’re watching is grounded in reality, particularly when it comes to the practicalities that go with Tuesday’s condition. There’s real empathy from the director and her small cast, so we share their emotions and, ultimately, their compassion.

While we associate Dreyfus with comedy, her more recent roles have shown a more serious side and here she plays it very straight, her slight frame being part and parcel of her emotional frailty and her face showing the weight of the personal world weighing down on her shoulders. She’s impressive and is well-matched by Petticrew, so their mother and daughter scenes are the beating heart of the film, full of tenderness and painful honesty. Despite the occasional hint of deadpan, even gallows, humour – Death remembers some of the people he’s met, describing Stalin as a “d*ck” and Jesus as “sarcastic” – this is a poignant film, a sad one, but alive with understanding and empathy. Death may be inevitable, but the same can’t be said for how Tuesday’s story unfolds.