There’s something quietly radical about Tuesday—a film that dares to make Death tender. In a media landscape addicted to trauma porn and the spectacle of pain, this story moves in a different rhythm. It doesn’t shout. It doesn’t beg for pity. It holds space.
The film follows a mother, Zora (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), and her terminally ill daughter, Tuesday (Lola Petticrew), as they both navigate the impending end of Tuesday’s life. But rather than centering suffering, the story invites us to sit with it. Not as something grotesque or cruel, but as something profoundly human. Death arrives as a talking macaw, a symbol already rich with contradiction—vibrant yet haunting, beautiful but unrelenting. This isn’t a villain. This is inevitability with wings.
In a time where care work is either undervalued or commodified, Tuesday demands we interrogate how we show up for those we love. It asks how we handle transitions, autonomy, and the tension between holding on and letting go. It’s about parenting and daughtering. It’s about control and surrender. And more than anything, it’s about how we grieve while someone is still alive.
The movie’s surrealism never becomes a gimmick. Instead, it allows us to access truths that realism often can’t reach. It’s what gives this film its soul—not the metaphysical kind, but the kind rooted in lived experience. The kind that knows bodies fail, that caretaking is exhausting and holy doesn’t exist—but dignity does. The kind that insists grief is nonlinear, selfish at times, and still deeply valid.
What makes this film essential viewing, especially for queer, disabled, chronically ill, and marginalized folks, is its fierce rejection of pity. Tuesday isn’t flattened into a symbol. She isn’t sanitized for easier consumption. She gets to be messy, witty, assertive, and scared. She gets to be real. And when she asserts agency, it’s not a plea—it’s a command. In a society that still infantilizes disabled and dying people, that’s revolutionary.
Zora, too, isn’t portrayed as a saintly caregiver. She’s complicated, resistant, prideful. Her character arc isn’t about achieving perfection but about learning to surrender control in order to truly love. It’s a lesson many of us, especially those socialized to fix everything, desperately need. In one particularly gutting moment, Zora tries to “bargain” with Death, and the film doesn’t let her off the hook for it. It sits with the ugliness of desperation without judgment. It shows us how grief shapeshifts, how it sometimes masquerades as denial, anger, or even manipulation.
The cinematography is ethereal and grounded all at once—sunlight bleeding into hospital corridors, dreamlike imagery intersecting with stark, grounded dialogue. The juxtaposition mirrors how it feels to lose someone: a floating detachment tethered to an all-too-heavy body. The macaw, voiced with a hushed gravitas by Arinzé Kene, becomes the film’s compass—never pushing, never pulling. Just present. A witness.
This isn’t just a story about death. It’s a story about love that doesn’t need to rescue. A story about letting someone write the end of their own story—even when you’re not ready to close the book. And in a cultural moment obsessed with control—over bodies, over narratives, over identities—Tuesday offers a different kind of power: the power of release.
So many of us have been taught that grief is linear, that closure is something we’re entitled to. But Tuesday reminds us that grief is often cyclical, wild, and unfinished. And maybe that’s okay. Maybe the point isn’t to finish mourning but to learn how to live alongside the ache.
In all its softness, Tuesday feels like protest art. It rejects a sanitized narrative around death and dying. It elevates the agency of those society would prefer to keep quiet or inspirational. And most importantly, it trusts its audience to hold ambiguity.
It’s not a perfect film. But it’s a brave one. And sometimes, that matters more.
Gemma Ortwerth 
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