Tues­day review – a mag­i­cal real­ist allegory

Writer/​director Daina O. Pusić’s fea­ture debut opens with irra­tional abstrac­tions. Not only do we hear whis­pers, and then a cacoph­o­ny of voic­es in the dark­ness, but then an amor­phous, shim­mer­ing spec­tral pat­tern across the screen’s void turns out to be a cos­mic auro­ra in a view from space of plan­et Earth – and then Earth appears reflect­ed in an open­ing eye that a slow zoom out reveals to belong to a scruffy look­ing par­rot, only for the cam­era to pull out even fur­ther to show that this unnat­u­ral­ly tiny macaw is itself nes­tled along­side human’s open eye, before it hops or flies off (rapid­ly chang­ing in size) to oth­er humans also in the process of dying, and with a wave of its wing, sees them off forever.

Like the angels in Wim Wen­ders’ Wings of Desire, this macaw (voiced by Arinzé Kene) tunes into the sounds of peo­ple – or indeed of all liv­ing things – but instead of mere­ly observ­ing them, it vis­its upon them the death they are await­ing, and is indeed death’s feath­ered embod­i­ment. That pro­logue both shows the bird at work, pass­ing from one mori­bund per­son to the next, and also exhibits its work­ings both on a cos­mic scale, and up close and personal.

The film is called Tues­day because that is the pre­ferred name of Lily Tues­day Markovich (Lola Pet­ti­crew), a 15-year-old with ter­mi­nal can­cer being looked after in her Lon­don home by nurse Bil­lie (Leah Har­vey). Mean­while Tuesday’s moth­er Zora (Julia Louis-Drey­fus) pre­tends to be at work but is in fact wan­der­ing about alone, unsure how to process what she knows is com­ing. She even sits in a café with the decid­ed­ly psittacine name ​“Polly’s”.

Tues­day is next on the bird’s list, but by engag­ing it in its first con­ver­sa­tion for years, per­suades it to allow her a stay of exe­cu­tion until her moth­er can return home. Yet Zora’s refusal to let Tues­day go, and the ensu­ing sus­pen­sion of death, bring spi­ralling, apoc­a­lyp­tic con­se­quences. Death, after all, has a cru­cial role to play in life, and while its pres­ence is not always wel­come, its absence proves grotesque­ly horrifying.

Tues­day is a mag­i­cal real­ist alle­go­ry, drama­tis­ing our feel­ings about mor­tal­i­ty – grief, denial, accep­tance, despair – and inter­ro­gat­ing what a good death might even mean. The intense moth­er-daugh­ter rela­tion­ship at its heart, filled as much with warmth and humour as with pan­ic and dread, affords the view­er an easy, empa­thet­ic route into the film’s more abstruse themes or out-there conceits.

This is a mov­ing and com­pas­sion­ate fable that hon­ours both the dying and those being left behind, while per­son­i­fy­ing, with­out ever demon­is­ing, death itself. The only dis­ap­point­ment is that Tues­day final­ly wraps up a lit­tle too neat­ly the eth­i­cal, exis­ten­tial and escha­to­log­i­cal ques­tions that it rais­es – although there are lay­ers of irony to be savoured in the way that the film, much like the athe­is­tic Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1944 play Huis clos deploys a super­nat­ur­al appa­ra­tus to deliv­er what is ulti­mate­ly a sec­u­lar message.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

By becom­ing a mem­ber you can sup­port our inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ism and receive exclu­sive essays, prints, week­ly film rec­om­men­da­tions and more.