To Julia Louis-Dreyfus , funerals can be a great place to laugh — “maybe one of the best laughs you would ever have,” she says. “In dark times, a good laugh is almost like a drug. It’s bumping up against something it’s the opposite of, which makes it much more needed.
” The ability to find humor and absurdity amid deep pain is at the heart of Louis-Dreyfus’ latest film, the dark comedy Tuesday (in theaters now). Louis-Dreyfus plays Zora, a mother struggling to accept the fate of her terminally ill daughter, the titular Tuesday (Lola Petticrew). Written and directed by the Croatian filmmaker Daina Oniunas-Pusic, the A24 -produced film uses a big dollop of magical realism to bring lightness and whimsy to the heavy subject matter: Death takes the form of a macaw — sometimes tiny, sometimes giant — who visits people in their final moments on Earth.
But when the bird prepares to take 15-year-old Tuesday’s life, Zora makes a deal with it to buy her daughter some time. The film draws inspiration from one of Oniunas-Pusic’s friends, who died of a degenerative illness while Oniunas-Pusic was a teenager. Tuesday — who Oniunas-Pusic says suffers from neuroblastoma, though that isn’t explicitly stated in the film — is restrained to a wheelchair and must use a ventilator.
In many ways, Pusic says that creating this story helped her heal from the profound loss she suffered when she was younger: “The selfish part of art or making films is that a lot of the tim.