Every Tuesday

Cultural decline can be measured in a thousand different ways, but surely one of them is the way in which the figure of Death is personified in the movies.

In 1957, Ingmar Bergman’s classic film The Seventh Seal offered Death in the form of a blank-faced man who wears a flowing black robe, speaks in Swedish, and is proficient in the game of chess. This is an image of Death one can flee in fear from and have a certain measure of respect for. By contrast, the new British movie Tuesday gives us Death as inhabited by a shape-shifting talking macaw.

To be sure, it is possible to imagine a movie in which a talking macaw is diverting, amusing, or even legitimately funny. But writer-director Daina Oniunas-Pusić has more earnest aims than merely inducing laughs. The audience is encouraged to take seriously a kind of alternate theology in which those actively dying or near death are paid a visit by this macabre macaw, whose dimensions vary depending on how close the victim is to drawing his or her last breath.

That is not to say that Tuesday is without humor, but much of it is of the unintentional variety. For example, an early scene depicts the macaw materializing in a city street in a manner that reminded me of nothing so much as Arnold Schwarzenegger in the opening of The Terminator. The computer-generated creature is voiced by Arinze Kene, but any credibility lent by the actor’s vocalization is quickly undercut by the bird’s uncanny resemblance to the character of Gonzo from The Muppets.

Soon enough, though, we come to understand that the film is not pulling our leg. Oniunas-Pusić has a deadly serious story to tell: Irish actress Lola Petticrew stars as the titular Tuesday, a teenager whose chipper wit and relatively hardy appearance belies the fact that she is suffering from a terminal illness. Cue the magic macaw, who flutters to the home in London that Lola shares with her inexplicably American mother, Zora (Julia Louis-Dreyfus). Unaccountably schooled in animism, Lola almost instantly perceives the macaw to be, at minimum, a messenger of death, which is consistent with one of the most troubling features in the film: Some of the soon-to-be-deceased people visited by the macaw plead for their lives, but just as often, they beg to be relieved of their suffering and therefore seem to welcome their deaths — as though the macaw were a kind of winged Dr. Kevorkian.

Before Lola proceeds to another dimension, however, she has some good times with the macaw, who turns out to be a cool dude: They listen to rap music. “Before you kill me, I just want to play you a song,” Lola says. Later, the human-avian duo partakes in some marijuana (presumably prescribed?) and page through an encyclopedia so that the macaw can describe the deaths of notables throughout history. These cringey scenes are no more imaginative, and no less corny, than Robin Williams entertaining cancer patients in Patch Adams.

In the filmmakers’ modern moral vision, Lola is to be commended for being blissfully resigned to her fate, but Zora is shown to be one of those awful people who resists, denies, and fights against the physical termination of existence. After the macaw persuades Lola to tell her mother that she is going to die that very evening, Zora reacts, sensibly, with an admonishment: “Don’t say stupid things like that.” (This is before she has become aware that her daughter is operating under the influence of a giant speaking bird.) Yet, for Oniunas-Pusić, Zora’s reaction is just an indication that she is not sufficiently at peace with the universe.

The metaphors then start coming at us fast and furiously: At one point, Zora is seen first bludgeoning, then setting on fire, and finally consuming the macaw — less, you see, to kill the bird than to, you know, stamp out the imminent death of her daughter and maybe death itself. Ironically, only after Zora comes to accept the inevitability of death does Louis-Dreyfus show some signs of life in her awkward performance. Apparently, in this film’s theological framework, acceptance of death is a precondition to having one’s full Elaine-ness come out on screen.

Tuesday would merely be trite and maudlin were it not for the pernicious assumptions that underlie its preposterous premise. The film is nearly a perfect object in the way it embodies contemporary society’s “spiritual but not religious” ethos: It is assumed, probably correctly, that audiences reared on a weird mixture of agnosticism, scientism, and mysticism will have an easier time accepting the reality of a grotesque macaw ushering people to their demise than the existence of God, who is said explicitly in the film not to exist. How do we hear this? The macaw tells us, of course.

Perhaps realizing that her ideal audience is irreligious but questing millennials, Oniunas-Pusić even has the macaw tell the grieving Zora that the afterlife is not a real place but a kind of state of mind among those who share memories of the departed and who strive to carry on in their honor. We hardly needed a squawking bird to deliver this Hallmark card-level post-religious platitude. The macaw also apparently ushers animal life into this nonexistent afterlife — the inclusion of pets among the ranks of the saints being a prerequisite in our culture.

In this film’s vapid vision, a person encountering death is not called to seek prayer, acquire wisdom, or ask forgiveness but merely to arrive at a state of placid contentment upon the arrival of a ginormous macaw. There has not been a more spiritually depressing film since the Brendan Fraser movie The Whale, which presented its protagonist’s extreme obesity and slovenliness as a sign of his inner virtue. Nor has there been a more aesthetically uninviting film since that lamentable Fraser “comeback” vehicle: The two films also share the same color palette, which can be described, charitably, as muddy verging on the indistinct.

Here, Oniunas-Pusić’s only moments of directorial inventiveness come after the macaw has been temporarily sidelined, an event that causes mass pandemonium as those slated for death, whether via illness or accident, persist in living. Perhaps the filmmaker should make a zombie movie next. Where have you gone, Ingmar Bergman?

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Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.