Daina O. Pusić’s modern fairy tale bites off more than it can chew in A24’s Tuesday

Courtesy A24

It’s strange to think of a movie as being too small and too big at the same time (it’s usually one or the other), but that’s exactly what Daina O. Pusić’s Tuesday suffers from. Pusić’s movie about a mother, her terminally ill daughter, and Death (in the form of a magic, size-shifting macaw) has no shortage of ambition, but it’s a fairy tale trapped in a much bigger story, one that cries out for both more detail and a better understanding of its scope.

We first meet Death (voiced by Arinzé Kene) flying through the air, hearing radio receiver-like frequencies of people all over the world in the final moments of their lives. It’s his job to visit each one of them and help their souls move on. It’s a burdensome job, but one that becomes surprisingly easy when he meets Tuesday (Lola Petticrew), a teenager with an unnamed respiratory illness who somehow quiets Death’s buzzing brain.

When Tuesday’s frazzled mom Zora (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) discovers the bird and learns that her daughter is fated to die that night, she doesn’t take it well. She attempts to kill Death (or at least delay him a while) so she can get extra time with Tuesday, while the rest of the world moves on, bizarrely unable to die. Of course, you can only put off a natural force for so long, and eventually Zora and Tuesday have to deal with the reality of Tuesday’s death, and how Zora will survive in its wake.

Tuesday is an example of that now-famous Ira Glass quote about the gulf between creatives at the beginning of their career with good taste, and the limits of ability and experience that keep their work from being exactly what they’d want it to be from the outset. As a writer and director, Pusić has taste to spare—I kept thinking as I watched it that it would make a killer novel, and there are memorable images throughout—but Tuesday requires tight structure and intimate knowledge of characters, settings and context to really work that isn’t quite there.

Louis-Dreyfus gives her all to her performance, but for all her effort, it seems like she doesn’t know her daughter all that well. She avoids spending time with Tuesday, despite having given up her job and selling her furniture to pay for her daughter’s medical expenses. Tuesday, for her part, seems shocked to learn how much her mom has gotten rid of, even though anyone living in a house where decor was constantly being scrapped and sold for parts would be very aware of someone removing tiles in the upstairs bathroom or dismantling their bed frame in order to sell it. The borrowed time Zora and Tuesday spend together later on seems like the first conversation they’ve had in a while. If they love each other this much, shouldn’t they know more about each other’s lives?

Courtesy A24

Meanwhile, the story happening around Tuesday and Zora—a world full of pain and fatal injuries with no relief—is much more interesting, but barely gets a glance. There’s a man whose legs have been chopped off crawling through the street, howling in pain. Cows at beef farms are slaughtered but remain standing up and mooing. At one point, Tuesday opens a curtain to see a headless bird sitting outside her window. These grotesque images are striking, but somehow, it always feels like we’re being pulled away from them to watch a story that isn’t ever as compelling as it should be, probably because the inner lives of the characters feel like they’re still held up by rickety scaffolding.

Tuesday is still an impressive achievement as far as first films go, but it also suffers from the same disease that many do — a talented filmmaker who has a lot to say but doesn’t yet have the grace to know how to say it efficiently. Its characters need interiority, and its grand, abstract concepts need focus that the main story isn’t adequately providing. The movie’s worth seeing to generate interest in whatever Pusić does next, though it never quite stands on its own.

Tuesday is currently showing at Glenwood Arts and AMC Town Center 20.