Tuesday review – a magical realist allegory

A mother and her teenage daughter come face to face with death in the form of a strange talking bird in Daina Oniunas-Pusic's feature debut.

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 cafe 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.

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Published 8 Aug 2024

Tags: Daina Oniunas-Pusic