Bird: "Tuesday"

Grief truly is a thing with feathers in the Croatian-born, London-schooled Daina O. Pusic's Tuesday, the kind of curveball our stalwart funding sources (the BBC, the BFI) could only have been persuaded to toss out with the marketing might of A24 at their arm. Nothing in this striking feature debut is quite as arresting as its opening movement, which sets us to believe a manky CG parakeet - initially palm-sized, but prone, like the film, to shapeshifting - is acting as some squawking Grim Reaper, flapping from municipal car park to backstreet to front parlour and, with a sweep of a wing that begins to resemble a final curtain, doing for those whose number is up. These first minutes are cosmic, trippy, properly freaky, so it's a slight pity that what follows reverts to the altogether familiar shape of the Small British Film: housebound, setbound even. The accursed bird now swoops into the lives of terminally ill teen Tuesday (Lola Petticrew) and her mother Zora (Julia Louis-Dreyfus, sans her usual hair and make-up team), who - as established by an early sequence in which she falls asleep in a park - is keen to avoid the subject of her daughter's imminent demise, and seems to be barely holding it all together in most other respects. The parakeet is still there, whether poised accusingly on the windowsill or curled up in Tuesday's inner ear, and talking with the voice of Arinzé Kene, no less; it's just it now serves the symbolic purpose of an elephant in the room, embodying all the things we fail to talk about when we talk about death. Even as I write those words, though, it feels like a critic's doomed attempt to impose outside shape and dull rationale on what proves, to its credit, a relentlessly restless and protean viewing experience.

As I hope you can tell, Tuesday has a certain idiosyncrasy in its favour. This is palpably the film Pusic, going long after a run of similarly animalistic shorts, wanted to make, and a film she's been left alone to make. It's encouraging, too, to see a low-budget British film that so capably integrates an effect as a major character: clearly, it's better for such a venture to do one effect well than try and rush through a thousand and one in the pell-mell of post-production. Yet Tuesday will inevitably hinge on the degree to which you feel the whole picture works, and I found my own answer changing almost from shot to shot. It's not necessarily bad that you come away unsure what sort of filmmaker Pusic wants to be; she's leaving her options open in an industry that has traditionally only had a few avenues to offer its creatives. Her film has a thick streak of the fantastical written through it: one immediate reference point would be that Pan's Labyrinth/A Monster Calls school, where the boundaries between this world and the next, the living and the dead, are porous to say the least. Yet even as the parakeet calls Stalin a "fucking prick", vomits on Tuesday's carpet and gets flambéed by Zora, I kept being reminded of kids' TV (the set design feels a limitation here); and it could well be that Pusic has a great career in advertising ahead of her. (Close your eyes when the bird is talking, and you could be listening to the next Aleksandr the Meerkat.) Petticrew and Louis-Dreyfus give good, precise performances - doubly so when interacting with the bird - and if you do find the film working for you, it'll be because the actors make the mother-daughter relationship so moving. Still, there are elements that don't integrate half as well, which is why I'm allowing for some variability of response. Tuesday's final days coincide with a wider apocalypse, signified by clouds of flies descending and Mr. Tumble stumbling zombie-like out of a bush. I sort of get it: Pusic is surely underlining that death is all around us, and that it behoves us to look it square in the eye. Yet these apocalyptic tropes undercut the film's message about ordinary, everyday grief; if this is the end of everyone's days, then Tuesday's passing is but a passing blip. Still, we've spent so many years lambasting the British industry for refusing to take a chance on anything that isn't a Downton Abbey derivative that it seems churlish to beat on a genuine risktaker when some of its swings don't connect. That Glazeresque opening really is brilliantly strange, and you can always mess with your own teens' heads by saying you're smuggling them into another Rio sequel.

Tuesday is now playing in selected cinemas.