has everything one could possibly expect from an A24 movie: the painfully tense mother-daughter relationship of ; the weird, animal-related body horror of and ; the tender, preemptive last moments spent with a cancer patient of ; the irreverent humor of ; the visceral, embodied magical realism of ; the apocalypse-ruined landmarks of ; the household name doing something Totally Different of ; the dream-like giant women of . Not to mention the Julia Louis-Dreyfus of it all, as she recently starred in . could have easily been called , 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. 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 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.