53927: Tuesday

Science is great, isn’t it? Math, physics, chemistry, medicine, geology—they’re all absolute bangers. They help us understand how the world works, from the grandest spiraling of galaxies to the lowliest muon and everything in between. I mean, I saw Oppenheimer. Science is an unstoppable juggernaut of repeatable, measurable facts and data. If we were erased tomorrow and replaced by an alien species or, like, super-smart squirrels, then science would reveal the universe to them in the same way. It’s objective, as opposed to the soft-headed arts, which exist because we have a shared, made up worldview, and we’re committed to it. Do you think those super-smart squirrels are going to come up with Night Court? No way. They’re going to build their own culture and it’s going to create its own artifacts, completely alien from ours. And that’s kind of a shame, because I would love to see Squirrel Night Court.

Even so, I’d bet all my acorns that at some point, they’d start telling each other tall tales about Death: Death as a physical presence; Death as a thinking, feeling, character with agency and motivations. Because no matter how good we get at science, we still can’t crack that final riddle. So, we turn to make believe to try and understand it. We start telling each other stories, folk or tall tales, to wrap our brains around the unwrappable. We imagine Death as a gaunt, scythe-wielding specter, an angel, a demon, a goat, a jackal, a guy playing chess, or a talking parrot, because we need to humanize Death in order to understand death.

In that sense, Tuesday fits snugly into the ancient tradition of tall tales of Death. In this version, written and directed by Daina O. Pusić, Death is a magical, talking macaw parrot who suffers from panic attacks and loves the music of Ice Cube. He strikes up an unlikely friendship with a 15 year-old in the end stages of an unnamed, fatal illness, and runs a fowl (sorry) of the child’s denial-stricken mother. I won’t spoil the plot, other than to say that what unfolds is the kind of magical realist tale you might expect to find in a novel by Gabriel García Márquez or Neil Gaiman. The fantastical elements serve to elevate the very real emotional story between mother and child without slipping into messy, maudlin, pseudo catharsis. It is not the movie I thought it would be, thankfully.

Arinzé Kene is simply amazing as the voice of (and motion capture source for) Death. The VFX artists obviously played a huge part in creating the look and movement of Death as well, and it’s worth noting that this relatively small, non-blockbuster, non-superhero movie still employed dozens of people in the visual effects department. Death cannot look cheap or crummy if this movie is going to work, and it’s clear that the producers put significant resources into making Death look real. Kene’s voice work brings Death to life (sorry) and allows us to root for him. He’s vulnerable, with halting speech and shame over his hygiene, tinged with pathos and unwanted wisdom. We’re allowed to believe that he wants to connect with someone or something, that even as Death he still has needs. But not like a Meet Joe Black kind of situation.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus turns in a heartbreaking performance as Zora, the mother of the film’s titular Tuesday. She is an absolute mess of grief, just awash in the “five stages” we all know so well. In one of her first scenes, she literally bargains with a taxidermist about the price of some stuffed rats she wants to sell. It’s a little heavy handed, placing her squarely in a big metaphor for death and the illusion of life, and having her bluff and charm and hustle to squeeze just a little more out of the shop owner, but we do get a sense of her very quickly. We also hear her lie to the shop owner about her daughter, saying that she’s always out partying and chasing boys. But maybe she’s lying to herself, and the owner just happens to be there. And while denial is a massive part of Zora, we also get to see her in the throes of rage, and sorrow, and *spoiler alert* eventual acceptance. And throughout, Louis-Dreyfus manages to infuse this heavy performance with pinpricks of light through the clouds around Zora, creating space for us all to breathe a bit easier.

Speaking of breathing, it’s central to the movie. We hear lots of ragged, circling-the-drain death breathing from various people, and most importantly from Tuesday herself. Lola Petticrew has an unenviable task as an actor. First, they’re 28 playing a 15 year-old, which is fine if you’re on The CW, but feels a little weird in a movie like this. Petticrew just doesn’t look like a teenager, particularly one about to die from whatever it is Tuesday is about to die from. So, that’s a rough place to start from. Next, Petticrew isn’t really allowed to move much, something actors generally enjoy doing. They have to deliver this performance from a bed, a couch, wheelchair, and from a Luke/Yoda kind of backpack situation. That’s pretty much it. Oh, and they have to be able to play Tuesday with a wisdom-beyond-her-years kind of aura. She is left to be the ego in the film, moderating the inchoate, id-ish desires of Zora against the wide-angle, big picture logic of Death’s super ego. That’s a lot to put on a child actor, I suppose.

Petticrew is successful in the role, 28-ness aside, and at the heart of the character is the advice to “just keep breathing.” Tuesday’s first interaction with Death brings on a panic attack for the bird, with Tuesday coaching him to breathe through it. She does a similar thing for Zora, later in the film. And it’s worth noting that Tuesday’s own inability to breathe is what brings Death into her story to begin with.

There’s not a whole lot of fault to be found with Tuesday. Yes, it’s a bit masochistic to sit down and watch a movie you know is about a “child” dying, but Pusić does a good job of keeping the focus on life and allowing death to linger in the background until we’re ready for it. We’re never ready for it, though, as the story demonstrates. In a way, life is preparing for death as best we can, all the while recognizing that it will never be enough and we have to be at peace with that. Death comes for us all, whether we like it or understand it or not. Stories like Tuesday remind us that that’s okay, and how we live in the meantime matters. It’s this rejection of nihilism that gives the story of a child’s death an uplifting message.

Go see it.