Julia Louis-Dreyfus in Tuesday (A24)

I’ll confess a weakness for talking and anthropomorphized animals. My affinity can neither be explained nor justified, only accepted. Yet if I were to try, I would say that they, like all well-made fantasy, upend our way of seeing the world. The wild worlds of Leonora Carrington’s stories, of Russell Hoban’s novel The Mouse and His Child, of The Jungle Book, and Lewis Carroll, are all wrought in a supremely playful spirit that endows the animal kingdom with unexpected elements. They are always just ahead of the reader in their embrace of the strange. In film, the eponymous dog and strange monsters of Alison De Vere’s The Black Dog, the creature at the center of Yuri Norstein’s Tale of Tales, and the stop-motion mice of Christiane Cegavske’s Blood Tea and Red String offer similarly enchanting transformations of the nonhuman world.

Yet there is another camp that even I have trouble getting on board with: when animals provide obvious symbols and teach obvious lessons. In many such movies, viewers might discern what the message is pretty early on. They may also feel like these films fundamentally betray the impulse toward fantasy, being more of a way to arrange an imagined world according to predetermined morals rather than to explore its mystery.

Tuesday, the debut film of Daina Oniunas-Pusic, lies, for better or worse, in the latter camp. The animal in question is a macaw who grows or shrinks as he needs, and is privy to voices from all over the world who are calling out that it is time for them to die. This bird is (guess who?) Death, and if he is here to teach us anything, it is (guess what?) that we all must let go. These voices plague and exhaust the parrot, but being Death, he has no choice but to go on. For each person he visits, he simply waves a single wing and, whatever the protestation, death follows. He never speaks.

This changes, however, when he meets Tuesday (Lola Petticrew), a 15-year-old girl with a terminal illness who is confined to a wheelchair. Tuesday tells the macaw a joke he likes and convinces him to pause before he waves his wing. This moves the bird to speech (voiced by Arinzé Kene), and the two of them develop an unlikely bond as they wait for Tuesday’s mother, Zora (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), to return home. The idea is that Tuesday will deliver the bad news to her and have a chance to say goodbye. As soon as Zora meets Death, though, she is intent on destroying him, thinking this will keep her daughter alive forever. Instead, it causes a crisis where no one can die.

Suffice to say, the film’s didactic impulse is not managed with rigor and skill. Whenever it tries for pathos, it does not just fall but backflips onto its face. The lessons it tries to teach are so tritely conceived that there is no hope a single tear will form. While Zora’s love for her daughter can be assumed, she is so hellbent on running from the truth and learns so little from her blatant mistakes (until she conveniently wises up at the end) that she is completely without texture. It is near impossible to feel for her the way the film presumably intends us to when she makes an unconvincing decision at the end.

The biggest surprise here is that any aspect of it feels like a missed opportunity. I was caught off guard by the bird himself. He is, to my shock, a charming beast. He makes pleasant grunting noises, which I enjoyed for their own sake, and it is easy to feel sympathy for him as he is tormented by voices of the dying. At times the soundscape of his mind comes across as overwrought, and at other moments it is more compelling than anything else onscreen. Furthermore, the conversations between Death and Tuesday are often quite funny and veer off in some unexpected directions that I wish had been given full rein. Indeed, there are a few one-liners from the bird that made me chuckle in spite of myself. What a premise this could have been with a different approach.