Tuesday

Tuesday is not a film about dying, but about the choices the living make when confronted with profound loss. It doesn't break your heart as much as help put it back together.

Tuesday is a magical realist allegory, dramatising our feelings about mortality – grief, denial, acceptance, despair – and interrogating what a good death might even mean.

There’s a grimly self-conscious “ain’t this just wacky?” overstatement to many of these scenes — a fatal over-reliance on vapid spectacle when any meaningful lower-key content would have sufficed.

There’s a real elegance and economy to Pusić’s direction, in the first half at least... Her tight grip on this fatalistic fairytale loosens a little as the film unfolds, but there’s no question that this is a remarkable and assured first feature.

The film is fantastical, but the ache at its heart is real, and stays with you.

As it is, the movie can’t quite bear to make the macaw properly funny, or properly scary. So the action exists in a tonal muddle.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus saves Tuesday from being too weird or too maudlin.

Tuesday puts you through the emotional wringer, giving even the hardest heartstrings a firm tug.

Muddled meditation on mortality, which is by turns sensitive and silly.

Dreyfus delivers a stunning portrait of a mother challenged to come good for her daughter in the last chapter of her life... but Oniunas-Pusic seems far too enamoured of her magic-realist metaphor than she should be.