“Tuesday” addresses grief and death through fantasy

Writer/director Daini O. Pusić makes an artistically bold feature film debut with “Tuesday,” addressing a most difficult topic: a mother coping with the imminent death of her terminally ill daughter Tuesday. Never minimizing the devastating situation, “Tuesday” transforms it into an extraordinary, insightful fantasy through the introduction of Death in the body of a size-shifting Macaw, alternately gargantuan or small.

Philosophical, hard-hitting, humorous, and genre-bending, “Tuesday” interprets disconcerting reality through bursts of capricious invention: a lonely, dirty parrot the agent of death. Film executive, mother Zora initially avoids incapacitated Tuesday’s increasing distress. It takes actresses with the talent of Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Zora and Lola Petticrew as Tuesday to engage the issues and audience as they do.

At last year’s Telluride Film Festival where I first saw “Tuesday,” Louis-Dreyfus said, “I’ve been touched by loss and understand the ferociousness of the mother instinct. I would eat Death to protect my child, and that’s not a metaphor.” This comment refers to Zora’s eventual, frantic confrontations with Death, and her desperate attempts to defeat him. This occurs only after Zora’s consistent avoidance of Tuesday’s situation, Zora going so far as to pretend she must head to work early while, in truth, sitting alone in a park or coffee shop. Regarding the unexpected bursts of absurdly funny comments and events, Louis-Dreyfus added, “Sometimes the funniest time in life is when it bumps up against the serious.”

In a Telluride press interview, Pusić agrees, noting that she needed the parrot to tell jokes, “to be scary but also endearing.” Pusić notes, “I’m Croatian, we use humor in order to overcome darkness.” And what a buoyant, welcome element it adds. Profoundly, in a superbly balanced performance as Zora grapples with inevitable loss, Louis-Dreyfus communicates the complexity of Zora’s dilemma with daring intensity, traveling through Kubler-Ross stages of denial, anger, and bargaining toward grim resignation.

The technical details complement the content, with Arinzé Kene’s altered voice as Death both solemn and, occasionally, playful. Alexis Zabé’s cinematography integrates lush colors and vast landscapes, claustrophobic rooms and puppeteering. Invented and dissonant sounds aid in bringing this invented world to life. Throughout this stunning escapist fantasy, the imaginative blend of surrealistic and realistic content delivers gut-wrenching emotion with surprising impact infused with sensitivity. Unique and trailblazing, “Tuesday” finds a new way to contemplate loss, grief, and death. “Tuesday” is available now.