Review: 'Tuesday' is a hauntingly beautiful and darkly absurd story of a mother and daughter facing death, with a heartbreaking performance by Julia Louis-Dreyfus

Profoundly touching, darkly comic and sometimes just weird, writer-director Diana O. Pusic’s debut feature “Tuesday” is a sharply realized and heartbreaking story of humankind’s inability to accept the one thing that is coming for each of us: Death.

In Pusic’s mad vision, Death is depicted as a bird — a mangy parrot, its orange feathers turned black by the muck and mire through which it moves through its existence. It hears the cacophony of voices of the creatures around it, and zeroes in on those who are close to death. Sometimes the bird grows to massive size, sometimes it shrinks to where it fits in the corner of a person’s eye. A person who sees it may plead for their life, but when it passes its wing over the person, that person dies and the bird moves on.

Except that’s not what happens when the Death bird comes to call on Tuesday (Lola Petticrew), a paraplegic 15-year-old girl living in London. Tuesday, left in her garden by her nurse, Billie (Leah Harvey), doesn’t cry out or plead for her life, and instead calms herself and does something unexpected: She tells Death a joke. (A pretty good one, actually.)

Then she takes the bird inside to take a bath, to wash off all the grime. In return, Death reveals that it can speak (with the guttural voice of Arziné Kene), and offers Tuesday enough time to break the news of her imminent death to her mother, Zora (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) — who has been walking around London, not suspecting that the weird behavior she’s witnessing may connect back to Tuesday’s afternoon with Death.

For the sake of spoilers, I will not describe what happens when Zora gets home, or the aftermath — except to say that it’s bizarre, funny in an offbeat way, absurdist, gut-wrenching and, even with the fantastical elements previously described, completely relatable. Zora, like any parent, would do anything to keep her daughter from what she sees as harm — and in this movie, “anything” turns out to be a wider range of actions than most stories would allow to unfold.

Pusic, a Croatian-born director based in London, launches this odd scenario and follows its many permutations to their logical, whimsical and tragic conclusions. Her visuals are charmingly inventive, particularly in the computer animation and puppetry that brings the shabby and terrifying old bird to life.

Louis-Dreyfus’ performance is a revelation, which is a weird thing to say about a 63-year-old actor who has been on our screens for nearly 40 years and has 11 Emmys to her name. Because of the story’s fantastical and absurd elements, the role requires someone with Louis-Dreyfus’ comic timing and ability to keep a straight face through the oddest moments. But while she’s doing that, Louis-Dreyfus is also finding a new gear, tapping into Zora’s fierce protectiveness and the awareness that preventing Zora’s death will be impossible — and the attempt ends up putting mother and daughter through hell.

The highest praise I can give “Tuesday” is this: For the first time in I can’t remember when, I could not at any moment predict what would happen next — and anything I might have imagined was outdone by what Pusic did instead. 

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‘Tuesday’

★★★★

Opens Friday, June 14, at theaters around Utah. Rated R for language. Running time: 111 minutes.