Tuesday: Julia Louis-Dreyfus outshines a giant talking parrot in this surprisingly sharp-edged fairy tale

In her first feature, an ambitious, eccentric, darkly comic tale about a mother’s struggle with surrendering her terminally ill daughter, writer-director Daina Oniunas-Pusić brings Death to vivid life as a size-shifting orange macaw (rumblingly voiced by Arinzé Kene) who ends human lives with a wearily efficient wave of his wing. Accustomed to being greeted by the dying with babbling fear, he’s stopped in his tracks by a shaggy-dog story proffered by cancer-stricken London teenager Tuesday (Lola Petticrew), and reluctantly grants her a small delay.

Nimbly reworking the death-tinged themes of her 2015 festival hit short The Beast, Pusić plunges the pair into an afternoon’s gentle friendship. She brings a big-swing confidence to their unlikely weed-and-rap-fuelled confessions, working splashes of magic realism into their wary exchanges, like the inky swirl Death’s feathers create when taking his first basin bath in decades. Two big swings in fact, since as well as incarnating Death as a misery-haunted macaw, she’s cast Seinfeld and Veep star Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Zora, Tuesday’s prickly, combative mother, who’s in heavy denial about Tuesday’s imminent demise.

The gambit pays off, with Louis-Dreyfus’s surprisingly sharp-edged Zora making the movie drop its cosy mood of whimsy, à la Me, Earl and the Dying Girl (2015), as she erupts into Tuesday’s supposedly final moments. Fighting like a lioness, Zora is as determined to defeat the alternately tiny or towering Death as Tuesday was to befriend him. Her wild tactics (to outline them would spoil their shock value) buy the mother-and-daughter a precious, playful interlude, a togetherness that Pusić skilfully tilts till we see who’s the real grown-up here. For like A Monster Calls (2016), the film is an adult fairytale, a parrot parable which turns the emotional turmoil around death into a fantasy-edged quest, as its second half becomes a race to repair the human chaos that Death’s sudden absence has unleashed.

Despite a determinedly suburban setting, imaginative CGI delivers grisly glimpses of London as a fire-and fly-swarm-dotted wasteland, highlighting death’s role in life. But the film has more impact when it’s a lively, domestic three-hander, high emotion bouncing between volatile Zora, peace-making Tuesday and Kene’s stoic, soulful Death, whose hair-raising voice combines with fine VFX creaturework to make the macaw a powerful presence rather than Paddington-cute. But it’s Louis-Dreyfus, astonishingly fierce and tender as a woman who simply can’t and won’t imagine life without her child, who gives the film the spiky energy that holds its poignant premise together.

 ► Tuesday is in UK cinemas from 9 August.