Tuesday review: Too much of everything, everywhere, all at once

Tuesday has everything one could possibly expect from an A24 movie: the painfully tense mother-daughter relationship of Lady Bird; the weird, animal-related body horror of The Lobster and Tusk; the tender, preemptive last moments spent with a cancer patient of The Farewell; the irreverent humor of Bodies Bodies Bodies; the visceral, embodied magical realism of The Lighthouse; the apocalypse-ruined landmarks of Civil War; the household name doing something Totally Different of Uncut Gems; the dream-like giant women of Love Lies Bleeding. Not to mention the Julia Louis-Dreyfus of it all, as she recently starred in You Hurt My Feelings. Tuesday could have easily been called Everything Everywhere All At Once, and it would have fit just as well.

If you read through that heavily-linked list thinking there’s no way that any of this could actually work, that’s because it doesn’t. Tuesday is a tonal mess, flitting between horror, humor, absurdity, and at least one candidate for this year’s most gag-inducing visual as quickly as a parrot traversing the oceans to deliver death to all the world.

Tuesday is almost impossible to summarize without sounding like you’ve lost it, or without somehow spoiling the whole thing. At its most basic level, writer/director Daina O. Pusić’s debut builds from the concept that the Grim Reaper is actually a cosmic parrot (voiced by Arinzé Kene) with an eternally sore throat and anxiety issues. He arrives as soon as he hears any voice in his head begging for either death or salvation, and with one sweep of his wing, it’s all over. The person is dead. That is, until he meets a sickly young girl named Tuesday (Lola Petticrew) who tells him a joke to distract him (had no one tried that before?), helps him through a panic attack, lends him her vape, and asks for him to please at least wait to kill her until her mom Zora (Louis-Dreyfus) gets home.

To follow that thread any further would be to ruin some of the film’s most shocking scenes (there are many), so here’s a different summary: Tuesday is a metaphor about a mother experiencing grief so immense it threatens to destroy the world. But even that description doesn’t begin to capture everything going on here. Neither does the film’s trailer, so if you’ve read this far and you’re still interested, you should probably close the page and try to go in as blind as possible. And you very well might love it; so many aspects of Tuesday could have been a vivid glimpse of beautiful plumage sneaking through this film’s many mottled feathers.

Louis-Dreyfus taps into something here she’s only ever shown off in Veep’s most manic moments, if at all. Alternating between pitiful, moving, and genuinely terrifying, she once again cements her status as one of Hollywood’s greatest and most intensely watchable performers, able to sell pretty much any outlandish idea with a mere twitch of her cheek. The effects are risky in an interesting way, and mostly work; just be prepared for intensive CGI to take up the majority of the film’s screentime. The characters’ emotions feel real and the film’s central metaphors about death and acceptance are fresh and interesting, at least before they get lost in the body horror, and the jokes about #MeToo and Gen X not understanding Gen Z, and the scene where Tuesday and the Death Parrot listen to Ice Cube, and the long interlude about taxidermized rats wearing little priest costumes—the list goes on and on.

Maybe Tuesday works better if you’re a parent, or have dealt with a similar loss yourself. Maybe the sheer madness will actually be a boon to some viewers. But as I watched the film, I kept coming back to a lesson from early in my J-school days. We had read a profile of Reality Winner, and my professor asked us to name the most important structural decision the writer made in the piece. The answer was that she had explained why Reality was named Reality in the first paragraph, because otherwise, people might have been too distracted by the off-the-wall name to focus on the rest of the article.

Tuesday never explains why Tuesday is named Tuesday. We eventually learn that it’s her middle name but we don’t know why. We never learn why Zora has an American accent but lives in London with a daughter who speaks like the Queen. We don’t know what type of illness Tuesday has or how long she’s had it. We don’t learn why Death is a parrot, how he can presumably be in many places at once during times of plague or famine but not when one mom is grieving for her daughter, or anything about the rules of who can see him and who can’t. We don’t even know if any of the events of the movie are actually happening.

These are obviously nitpicky critiques for a movie attempting something so bold, but to pull off something this odd, the filmmaker needs to give audiences something to latch onto. We can accept that Death is a parrot. We can even accept that in his infinite lifespan, he’s never learned to name five things he can see and four things he can smell to calm himself down. That’s all well and good, but a film can’t just be bizarre, sad, and shocking in turn with nothing real to anchor it to the ground. If Tuesday had chosen to zero in one one or even three of the elements from the first paragraph of this review, it could have been genuinely profound. Instead, it’s just profoundly weird.