Tuesday is the feature directorial debut from prolific short filmmaker Daina O. Pusić. The trailers for Tuesday paint the film as a heart-wrenching fable about loss. I was excited to see this movie. I love a good cathartic movie cry, I love Julia Louis Dreyfus, and how she continues to make interesting choices in films like this and her work with Nicole Holofcener. The central plot of this film, as described to me by the advertising material, sounded like it would make for a very emotional, effective story. 

However, I would say the advertising material for Tuesday is somewhat misleading. And even though this film is already playing in wide release, I’m writing about it today because you should know what you’re getting yourself into when you buy a ticket or rent it on digital platforms later down the line.

We meet the titular Tuesday (Lola Petticrew), a terminally ill 15-year-old girl in London. Tuesday is dying, and is tired of being in pain every day. Her mother Zora (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) cannot cope with the inevitable. She pretends to go to work every day, leaving her daughter with a nurse (Leah Harvey), but hangs out in public parks and coffee shops all day. One day, Tuesday is visited by a size-shifting macaw parrot that represents the concept of death. It visits dying people all over the world and kind of graces every dying creature’s departure from this earth. Once Zora arrives at home, she panics once she realizes what is happening. This sends mother and daughter on a journey where both must find some way to reach a stage of acceptance before it’s too late.

Describing the weird shit that goes down in Tuesday would constitute a spoiler, so I will not go into it, but the film is strangely plot heavy and is weirdly focused on world-building. This should be a film about big emotions and universal truths about the importance of life and what it means when it ends. However, the film makes a series of wildly jarring decisions pretty much from the moment we begin. A significant focus here is about how the parrot itself is required for all human and animal death on earth and without it, the world descends into chaos. 

Julia Louis Dreyfus is doing very good work here, playing very against type. We don’t see her in many dramas, and she’s always capable of reminding the viewer she contains multitudes. Zora is not a very pleasant or relatable character, and she makes many choices throughout the film that are baffling. And I guess the challenge of that could seem very appealing to an actor. Beyond that, it is difficult to understand what made Dreyfus say yes to this role. 

Tuesday aims for profound and misses. It tries to cut the gloomy mood with moments of silliness, but it just ends up feeling incredibly awkward tonally. It is so heavy handed and so repetitive and so bogged down in metaphor, I feel like Pusić’s script often loses sight of what it’s trying to say. I don’t really know exactly what we were trying to say here? What was the goal the filmmaker set out for? I’ve seen so many films about grief and death and mortality (this reminded me a lot of the much more effective A Monster Calls) that seem much more focused in what they were going for. Oh, also the CGI parrot looks terrible.

Daina O. Pusić, as I’ve said, is well known for directing short films, and I thought many times throughout Tuesday that this might work a lot better as a 25-minute short film. Because stretched out to feature length, Pusić is jamming ideas into the runtime. Ideas that are so similar to each other, it often feels like she’s saying the same thing over and over again. The film is ultimately a needlessly ridiculous, baffling and exhausting experience that leaves you feeling miserable, but never in a way that feels like the film earned that. It’s an allegory without a solid ground, it’s all metaphor without recognizable human truth. It just left me very cold.