Tuesday is a 2023 British-American fantasy drama about a terminally ill teenager, her mother, and Death—who arrives as a talking, shape-shifting macaw. Written and directed by Daina O. Pusić in her feature debut, the film uses an extraordinary supernatural premise to examine anticipatory grief, parental control, and the painful difference between understanding death and accepting it.
The film premiered at Telluride in 2023 but received its main U.S. theatrical and streaming releases in 2024, which is why it may be listed as either Tuesday (2023) or simply Tuesday on different services.
What is Tuesday about?
Zora, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, is caring for her terminally ill teenage daughter, Tuesday, played by Lola Petticrew. Their home is already organized around illness, care, and the expectation of loss when Death appears—not as a hooded human figure, but as a giant orange macaw voiced by Arinzé Kene.
The bird can change size and speak, but it is not a conventional villain. Death has a job to do and has encountered countless dying people. Tuesday’s personality, intelligence, and willingness to engage with him interrupt that routine. Zora, however, cannot accept that her daughter’s death is approaching. Her refusal turns the film’s supernatural encounter into a conflict between a mother’s instinct to protect and the reality that mortality cannot be defeated by force.
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That makes Tuesday less a conventional supernatural thriller than a challenging grief fable. Its fantasy, horror, dark comedy, and drama are all placed in service of one question: what does it mean to let someone go when every part of you wants to keep them alive?
Why is it called Tuesday (2023) if it came out in 2024?
The film’s identity is tied to 2023 because it premiered at the Telluride Film Festival on September 1, 2023, and circulated through the festival circuit that year. It was also selected for the 2023 BFI London Film Festival and competed for that festival’s Sutherland Award.
A24’s principal U.S. theatrical release came in June 2024, with June 14 commonly listed as the wide theatrical date. The film’s U.S. streaming or digital release followed in July 2024. In the United Kingdom, the theatrical release took place in August 2024. Both labels are therefore defensible, but they describe different parts of the film’s release history: 2023 refers primarily to the premiere and production-era identity; 2024 refers to the main commercial release.
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- Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Zora: Tuesday’s mother. Zora’s panic, anger, and refusal to surrender control drive the emotional conflict.
- Lola Petticrew as Tuesday: A terminally ill teenager who confronts Death with more directness and curiosity than her mother can manage.
- Arinzé Kene as Death: The voice of the macaw-like manifestation of Death. Kene’s performance gives the creature personality without reducing it to a simple monster or comic mascot.
- Leah Harvey as Nurse Billie: A supporting character connected to Tuesday’s care.
- Ellie James as Willow: A supporting character in the film’s cast.
Anna Meredith composed the original score, while Alexis Zabe served as cinematographer. Pusić wrote and directed the film in her feature debut after studying film and television directing at Zagreb’s Academy of Dramatic Art and the London Film School. Her earlier short film The Beast screened at Telluride and other festivals.
The macaw is the film’s central idea, not just its strangest image
The most immediately memorable feature of Tuesday is Death’s form. The character is a vivid orange macaw that can become enormous or shrink to a much smaller size. It would be easy to treat the bird as an eccentric visual gimmick, but the choice does important thematic work.
A human Grim Reaper would bring familiar symbolism with him: robes, a weapon, a skull, and the visual language of medieval personification. The macaw is less predictable. It is beautiful, comic, theatrical, unsettling, and difficult to categorize. Death becomes an embodied presence that can enter an intimate domestic space without behaving like a standard horror antagonist.
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The bird also makes mortality conversational. Death is not an invisible abstraction or merely a medical prognosis; he can listen, argue, wait, and be affected by Tuesday. That does not make death less powerful. Instead, it creates a tension between Death’s enormous, impersonal function and the intensely particular life of one teenager.
Tuesday’s encounter temporarily disrupts Death’s routine because she treats him as someone who can be addressed rather than as an unknowable force. The result is both absurd and emotionally serious. The film asks whether a person can humanize Death without pretending that death itself is negotiable.
Grief, control, and the difference between knowing and accepting
Zora knows that Tuesday is dying. The problem is that knowledge has not become acceptance. She is not simply uninformed or confused; she is a mother confronting a fact that feels morally impossible. Her efforts to preserve Tuesday’s life come from love, but the film also shows how love can become refusal when it cannot tolerate limits.
That distinction gives the story more substance than a simple “mother learns to let go” narrative. Zora’s resistance is understandable. The film does not need her to love Tuesday less in order to move toward acceptance. Instead, it examines the way grief can turn protection into control and how the desire to prevent suffering can create further suffering.
Tuesday, meanwhile, is not portrayed only as a passive patient waiting for the story to happen around her. Her conversations with Death give her an unusual position: she is the person facing mortality most directly, while the adults around her struggle to speak plainly about it. Her perspective helps expose the gap between the person who is dying and the people who believe they must protect that person from the truth.
This is why the film’s most important conflict is not whether Tuesday will die. The premise establishes that she is terminally ill. The deeper conflict is whether Zora can recognize that Tuesday’s life belongs to Tuesday, even at the point when Zora desperately wants to control its ending.
Spoiler section: what happens after Death meets Tuesday?
The following discussion contains major plot spoilers.
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Death grants Tuesday additional time to say goodbye, but his absence has consequences beyond the family’s immediate situation. As the story develops, the wider world begins to deteriorate while Death is away from his normal work. Zora responds by taking increasingly extreme measures to keep Tuesday alive, turning her refusal into a threat that affects more than the two of them.
Tuesday ultimately becomes the person who must help both Zora and Death understand what mortality requires. The film’s resolution is not about discovering a loophole that defeats death permanently. It is about recognizing that death is part of the cycle of life and that letting go can be an act of love rather than a betrayal of the person being lost.
That conclusion does not make the grief easy or tidy. Tuesday is interested in the emotional violence of acceptance: the fact that accepting a death can feel, from inside the experience, like abandoning someone. Its fantasy structure allows the film to make that internal conflict literal, giving Zora an actual supernatural force to fight while preserving the painful truth that no victory over Death can last.
A film that mixes grief drama with dark comedy and horror
Tuesday moves between registers that do not always sit comfortably together. It is a family drama about terminal illness, a fantasy about a supernatural visitor, a dark comedy built around the incongruity of a talking macaw, and at points a horror film concerned with bodily and social deterioration.
That tonal instability is deliberate, but it is also one reason the film can divide viewers. Someone expecting a conventional tearjerker may find the talking bird and surreal imagery too strange. Someone expecting a rules-based fantasy thriller may find the film more interested in emotional and symbolic logic than in explaining every supernatural detail.
The risk is part of Pusić’s approach. Rather than soften the subject through realism alone, she makes death visually extravagant. The macaw’s theatricality gives the film room for humor, while the underlying situation keeps that humor from becoming emotionally weightless. The result is not designed as a comfortable viewing experience; it is a stylized meditation on mortality that repeatedly asks the audience to accept contradictory feelings.
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Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s performance
Louis-Dreyfus is best known for comic timing, and Tuesday uses that history productively without turning Zora into a sitcom character. Her performance retains a sense of timing and physical precision, but those qualities are redirected toward panic, denial, exhaustion, and maternal grief.
Zora’s refusal is sometimes frightening and sometimes recognizable. She can be funny because her responses collide with the absurdity of Death’s appearance, but the humor does not erase the desperation underneath. The performance’s strength lies in showing how quickly a person can move between practical care, anger, bargaining, and emotional collapse.
Petticrew’s Tuesday provides an important counterbalance. She gives the character enough independence to prevent the film from becoming solely a portrait of a parent’s suffering. Kene’s voice performance, meanwhile, has to make Death feel simultaneously ancient, strange, conversational, and capable of being surprised. The three central performances give the film its emotional argument: the dying person, the person who cannot accept the death, and Death himself do not understand the situation in the same way.
Anna Meredith’s score
Anna Meredith’s original score is a significant part of the film’s unusual atmosphere. It supports the movement between tenderness, unease, absurdity, and grandeur rather than treating the story as a straightforward realist drama.
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The Tuesday original soundtrack was released digitally as a 15-track album through A24 Music on July 16, 2024. Meredith’s official materials also confirm physical editions in limited-edition 12-inch vinyl and CD formats, with artwork by Eleanor Meredith and lettering by Martin McGrath. Anyone looking for the Tuesday soundtrack on limited-edition vinyl should verify the current retailer listing and stock status before purchasing, since availability of physical editions can change.
Where to watch Tuesday
In the United States, the film has been available through digital rental and purchase services following its theatrical run. A U.S. availability listing checked on June 28, 2026 reported Tuesday as available to rent or buy through Amazon Video and other digital storefronts. The listing also reported Roku Channel availability beginning August 1, 2026; because streaming catalogs, prices, and regional rights change frequently, viewers should check the current listing in their country before publication or purchase.
The film’s U.S. rating is R for language, and its runtime is approximately 110 minutes. Availability in the United Kingdom and other territories may differ from the U.S. listing.
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Critical response has been more favorable than audience response. Rotten Tomatoes listed the film at 76% from 116 critic reviews and 51% from more than 50 verified audience ratings at the time of research. Its critics’ consensus highlighted the film’s meditation on mortality, its stylistic risks, and the committed performances of Louis-Dreyfus and Pusić’s direction.
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Best Value
Box-office databases also report different totals. IMDb lists approximately $706,683 for the United States and Canada and approximately $760,443 worldwide, while Rotten Tomatoes reports a U.S. gross of approximately $620,000. These figures should not be treated as a single uncontested final total; they may reflect differences in reporting scope or later reconciliation.
The film was nominated for the 2023 BFI London Film Festival Sutherland Award competition. Other databases list nominations connected with visual effects and first-feature categories; those should be described as nominations unless confirmed directly by the relevant awarding organization.
Who should watch Tuesday?
Tuesday is a strong choice for viewers who enjoy independent fantasy dramas, visually inventive stories about grief, and films that use genre rather than realism to approach difficult emotional subjects. It may also appeal to viewers interested in Daina O. Pusić’s emergence as a filmmaker or Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s dramatic work outside television comedy.
It is less suitable for viewers seeking a medically detailed account of terminal illness, a conventional supernatural thriller, or a reassuring story about overcoming death. The film is not a documentary, true story, adaptation, or standard medical drama. It is an original fantasy drama whose talking macaw is the mechanism through which it explores an otherwise familiar human terror.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Tuesday a 2023 or 2024 movie?
Both dates refer to different stages of its release. Tuesday premiered at the Telluride Film Festival on September 1, 2023, but its main U.S. theatrical release took place in June 2024 and its U.S. digital release followed in July 2024. It is commonly indexed as Tuesday (2023).
Is Death a parrot in Tuesday?
Death appears as a talking, size-shifting macaw or macaw-like bird. Calling the character a parrot is imprecise; official and critical descriptions identify the bird as a macaw.
Is Tuesday based on a true story?
No. The available production materials identify it as an original fantasy drama written and directed by Daina O. Pusić. It is not presented as a true story or adaptation.
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The film runs approximately 110 minutes.
What is Tuesday rated?
In the United States, Tuesday is rated R for language. Ratings can vary by territory.
Who composed the music for Tuesday?
Anna Meredith composed the original score. The soundtrack was released digitally as a 15-track album, and physical vinyl and CD editions were also produced.
The Bottom Line
Tuesday is an ambitious, unconventional grief film rather than a conventional thriller. Its talking macaw makes Death visible, theatrical, and unexpectedly conversational, while Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Lola Petticrew, and Arinzé Kene ground the fantasy in a painful conflict about love and control. The film’s 2023 premiere and 2024 commercial release explain its split dating, and its digital availability should be checked by territory because listings change.
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