Not even Julia Louis-Dreyfus can get 'Tuesday' off the ground

What comes after death is arguably humanity's great unknown, making grief and the afterlife endless themes for storytelling. How to visualize death, perhaps the most famous realization in Ingmar Bergman's “The Seventh Seal,” has also long haunted filmmakers. In “Tuesday,” the first feature film by UK-based Croatian writer and director Daina O. Pusić, death becomes a macaw.

Yes, a macaw. As the bird goes about its business, flapping a wing over those who have run out of time, it changes size, growing to a larger-than-human scale or shrinking to hide in a young woman's ear. You can also communicate with people. There's something disconcerting and a little silly about the idea (the creature is voiced and performed by actor Arinzé Kene, augmented by CGI) and the film puts an unbalanced amount of attention on the bird. If it's supposed to be the big innovation and motivating element of the rest of the film, it just doesn't hold up.

This means that the film's human story, where its interests should more appropriately lie, ends up feeling short-changed by so much focus on the macabre macaw of death. Zora (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), an American woman living in London, struggles to come to terms with the imminent death of her terminally ill daughter, Tuesday (Lola Petticrew).

Pusić isn't very interested in the details of the backstory or how these characters ended up in these circumstances, which benefits the film, keeping it very focused on the moment, and also harms it, with too many distractions and unfinished business. questions about the big picture. The film feels like an adaptation of a short story that has been pushed to the limits of its literary map, struggling to expand beyond it.

Much of what works in the film revolves around Louis-Dreyfus' performance. He has long been a master of a certain kind of aggrieved resignation, the sense that the forces of the world are somehow conspiring to make his day worse. In his work with writer-director Nicole Holofcener on “Enough Said” and “You Hurt My Feelings,” he found a more dramatic register, though still rooted in comedy. Here, the allegorical absurdity of the situation is based on his comic reserves, in contrast to the seriousness of a woman who denies the imminent death of her daughter. Louis-Dreyfus fluidly combines conflicting emotions.

With “Tuesday,” Pusić shows great promise as a visual storyteller and artist director. However, it is in his work as a screenwriter where the film falters. Without the power and nuance that Louis-Dreyfus brings to the role, the drama would not have as much power and impact as it does. There is still not much need to make an appointment with this “Tuesday”, more of a rarity than a revelation.