2024 | PG-13 | starring Julia Louis-Dryfuss, Lola Petticrew | written & directed by Daina Oniunas-Pusic | 1h 50m | 2 1/2 out of 5 stars |
Tuesday (Lola Petticrew) is a teenage girl with an incapacitating illness that keeps her wheelchair-bound and requiring 24-hour care. One day Death flies down to her in the form of a talking bird, which she convinces to not take her until she can bring her mother (Julia Louis-Dryfuss) of accepting the idea that she is ready to go. Unable to confront this physical incarnation of Death, mom tries to get rid of the bird, with disastrous consequences.
If you were one of those people who only watched movies and didn’t watch TV, you would only know Julia-Louis-Dryfuss as a dramatic actress who occasionally appeared in sad indie dramas (Enough Said, Downhill or last year’s You Hurt My Feelings) or post-credit teasers in Marvel movies. You wouldn’t have any idea that she was the star of the two best comedies of their respective decade and has won more Emmy’s for comedy than any other woman in the history of the medium. Her movie career absolutely baffles me. I get what would draw someone to Tuesday, on paper it’s a heck of a weird concept brimming with potential about life, death, acceptance and self-determination. In execution, it’s one of the weirdest movies I’ve seen this year and not in a fun or compelling way.
I’ve grown increasingly tired and uninterested in this subgenre of A24-style fantastical dramas – films grounded in everyday life, centered around someone processing some sort of heavy emotional toil, told through a metaphor of a single fantastical change in their life. The talking bird in Tuesday is like the child with a lamb’s head that Noomi Rapace raises in Lamb, the giant in the Boots Riley series Virgo or the fantastical ending of Rose Glass’ Love Lies Bleeding – just to name a few. Movies told as straight dramas with some absurd, fantasy element dropped in the center of them to give the trailer some buzz and sucker in people who want to see something truly weird, while being treated as deadly serious by the tone of the filmmaker (in this case feature debut Daina Oniunas-Pusic). Raising a child with a Lamb’s head is a comedy premise, just as potentially living in a world where people can’t die (or at least negotiate with Death) is a darkly comic premise. But Tuesday is simply interested in the most superficial exploration of this topic. It’s bird, simply a visual metaphor with the obvious message about dying with dignity hanging over the movie like a thick fog.
Even with its very serious situation as the backdrop, there is a world in which the twists and turns in this movie are delivered as jaw-droppingly crazy, the kind of thing you would tell friends about and spread around word of mouth in the way The Substance has gained so much traction this year for hitting those absurd and shocking beats. This movie could have done that, but Pusic isn’t ready to go there or unable to balance the tone of what this story could be. I would love to see this premise in the hands of someone like a Charlie Kaufman, Yorgos Lanthimos or Edgar Wright. A filmmaker who could pull it apart for all of its creative potential and explore it to its most satisfying degree. Pusic turns it into a surreal, unsatisfying music video. An art piece that makes its point and drones on.