Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Death takes many forms, as emphatically proved in the striking new curio Tuesday. The film is mostly British — set in London and co-funded by the BBC — but stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus, the fictional American vice-president of Veep, as harried single mother Zora. Her transatlantic journey to what looks like Zone 4 of the UK capital is never explained. Such details would also be easy to miss.For now, we find her wandering through a suburban park before returning to the home she shares with daughter Tuesday (Lola Petticrew, excellent) — a sparky teenager with terminal cancer.You may now be expecting the kind of film that Tuesday indeed often is: tear-stained and wrenching. It is also something far more singular, as is clear from what Zora now finds in Tuesday’s bedroom. That shape in the corner is a monstrous, inky black macaw — one that is Death itself, here to sweep up Tuesday’s soul with a single flap of a wing. (Yes: that old cliché.) Usually, the bird is giant in size, but given to shrinking when under stress. Naturally, being a parrot, it also speaks. The voice is supplied by actor Arinzé Kene: bassy, cracked, sorrowful. Having swung this big from the start, the film has to keep faith with its own audacity. It does. Writer-director Daina O Pusić holds her nerve as a story takes shape. Tuesday’s mother resolves to save her daughter; but the young woman herself comes to see this feathered nightmare as a friend. The domestic gives way to the cosmic. Whatever the movie’s supposed Britishness, Pusić is Croatian, and looks at London with fresh eyes. The polite social realism of UK cinema is reshaped into absurdism.The risks are everywhere. The stylistic gymnastics could overpower, or even read as tasteless. And quite a lot about Tuesday doesn’t work: it can feel like six short films haphazardly glued together. But the comedy in the movie is just the right degree of mordant. (A special mention here for Death’s memories of Jesus and Stalin.) Ultimately, Pusić’s flights of imagination remind you how raw and strange loss and mortality are. The film is fantastical, but the ache at its heart is real, and stays with you.★★★☆☆In UK cinemas from August 9
