In keeping with the house-sauce magic realism of Love Lies Bleeding and I Saw the TV Glow, Daina Oniunas-Pusić’s debut feature is easily pegged as a contemporary A24 joint.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus, working every acting muscle, is Zora, an awkward absent mom selling taxidermy figurines and sleeping in the park to avoid her terminally ill teenage daughter, Tuesday (the Belfast actor Lola Petticrew). It falls to an earnest hospice nurse, Billie (Leah Harvey), to tend to the title character.
Death is introduced as a shape-shifting macaw (voiced and performed by the EastEnders alumnus Arinzé Kene) who appears during the last seconds of mortality. He is variously begged, embraced and spat upon. When the feathered grim reaper comes for Tuesday, she struggles to catch her breath and tells him a joke about penguins.
The bird and the ailing teenager strike a strange bargain: she bathes him and he allows her to wait for her mother. Zora, however, will do anything to deny her daughter’s mortality, an avoidance that finds expression in a surreal act of violence. Meanwhile, beyond the walls of the poignantly empty family home, the absence of death wreaks havoc.
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The Croatian writer-director fashions a timeless, visually arresting fable from a conceit pitched somewhere between Rudyard Kipling and Angela Carter. The pacing can be slow, but tremendous performances from Louis-Dreyfus, Petticrew and Kene offset the longueurs. Personifications of death have stalked cinema in the guise of Frederic March (Death Takes a Holiday), Jessica Lange (All that Jazz) and Brad Pitt (Meet Joe Black), but he has seldom squawked so appealingly.
A carefully modulated tone allows zombie cows, end-of-life care and jokes about furious masturbation to coexist, sometimes in the same scene.
Tuesday is in selected cinemas from Friday, August 9th
