Take a risk. Make a new movie. Combine all the elements of other art house movies. Get a good actor on board. Create an array of themes and topics anchored around death and grief. Center the whole thing around a horrendously voiced computer-generated bird. Have him sing an Ice Cube song. Make him a bird of death, coming for a teenager played by a twenty-eight year old. Make it different. Anything different must be something else, anyway, and if there are too many ideas, the audience may at least say you’ve tried everything you can do.
All risk and no payoff, Tuesday overflows with metaphors and while any five of them may be fine in isolation, they combine into a muddled mess of a movie that is doing too much. The talking parrot movie stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus as a Mom who is about to grieve the imminent death of her daughter. The bird of death, played with grating and lost tonality by Arinzé Kene, has come to kill her daughter, but they come up with clever and small distractions to sidetrack the bird.
The return of George Miller’s Mad Max saga has us reminiscing over his last movie, the supremely weird and under-seen Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022) — perhaps the movie that has the most in common execution-wise with this one. The difference is a simple one: the symbols and motives in that movie are clear and in this one they are arranged in chaos — it’s hard to get a very good reading on meaning when the film is an abstract hodgepodge of disparate parts all clashing against one another in fear of keeping any consistent tone.
The movie misses its heartfelt mark by a wide margin and it’s down largely to the bird of death, who occupies so much screen time, and is a nuisance to the film’s storytelling, bringing it wildly afield in both tone and inconsistency, while also being paired against Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who is up to so much more in the movie.
The messy categorization of the movie — a product of A24 shot in 2021 and released in 2024 — seems to have its heart in the right place, and we can firmly believe that director Daina Oniunas-Pusic is only going on to brighter and more controlled work, but when the screenplay of a movie goes so far out-of-hand, it’s hard to ever square things away and find the heart of the thing. This is a movie with too many thoughts, all presented in an unclear mash of bad cg and awkward performance, but there’s something here, big ideas, for sure, just far too many of them. It’s good to take a big swing but sometimes you’re just not going to make any contact at all. There’s no shame in it. Next time.