Tuesday

Tuesday, 2024, 3 ¼ stars

Death becomes her

Exclusive to MeierMovies, April 17, 2024

Ingmar Bergman imagined a chess player, Rod Serling a hitchhiker and Martin Brest Brad Pitt. Writer-director Daina Oniunas-Pusic, in her feature debut, instead depicts death as, well, you’ll see – suffice to say polly wants more than a cracker.

In arguably her best post-Seinfeld performance, Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays Zora, the mother to a terminally ill teenager, Tuesday, played well by Lola Petticrew (the BBC show Bloodlands). But when the Grim Reaper, voiced hauntingly by Nigerian-British actor Arinzé Kene, flies in to snatch her daughter, Zora fights back. For her, bird is not the word.

Refreshingly weird and darkly imaginative, Tuesday is a fantasy-dramedy reminiscent of both Swiss Army Man and The Seventh Seal. Memorable not just in its presentation of maternal grief but also in its depiction of a world briefly deprived of death – it’s not as good as you think – Tuesday embraces an askew, surreal sensibility that, admittedly, might not resonate with mainstream audiences. But I hope you love it to death.

© 2024 MeierMovies, LLC

This capsule review is part of my coverage of the 2024 Florida Film Festival. To find out when this movie is playing and buy tickets, go to FloridaFilmFestival.com. For more information about the event and an index of reviews of other festival films, go here. For more information on this movie, visit IMDB.