Cuckoo is screening as part of the 2024 Fantasia International Film Festival, which runs from July 18 to August 4.
I can’t help but feel that Cuckoo is a series of intriguing parts in search of a sum. Writer-director Tilman Singer introduces potentially fresh approaches to well-worn horror-thriller ideas, but these ideas never fully culminate in something satisfyingly original.
In the film, Gretchen (Hunter Schafer), a young rebellious teenager, moves from the United States to Germany to live with her father in a secluded estate in the Alps with his new wife and her young daughter. It is a decision she quickly regrets. Feeling homesick, she calls her mother and leaves a message saying as much. More than this, she is put off by the home, the neighboring resort at which she is given a job, and the people populating the area. In particular, Mr. König (Dan Stevens), the owner of the resort and Gretchen’s father’s employer, unnerves Gretchen.
Par for the course with horror films, strange and inexplicable occurrences start bringing themselves to Gretchen’s attention. Her mute half-sister Alma (Mila Lieu) starts convulsing in her bedroom in an apparent seizure brought on by a sound coming from the nearby woods. Women coming into the resort lobby occasionally fall suddenly ill and vomit. Mr. König insists that Gretchen not ride her bike home at night. Singer introduces the strangeness with a compelling sense of mystery. The framing is key on this front. One eerie early scene uses great use of background, shadows, and high angles to make for a deceptively simple chase set piece.
For these early set pieces, it is the details in Singer’s direction that get under your skin. The cacophonous sound design. The visual effect of a line of blood trailing up a character’s upturned face, slowly seeping into the eye. The staging and set design of a honeymoon suite. On a style front, Singer excels.
The film’s faults are, instead, mainly narrative. For me, 2024 is shaping up to be the year of horror films with good execution and disappointing story problems. Immaculate. Maxxxine. In a Violent Nature. Longlegs. And now Cuckoo. All pretty fun to watch, until the weight of their story problems give way to clunky third acts. (To be fair to Immaculate, the third act is its best act, in my opinion. And to be fair to Violent Nature, that film runs away from meaningful plot so quickly that it’s almost admirable).
For Cuckoo, the third act is such a stark shift away from the ambience and mystery of the rest of the film that it is slightly confounding. To put it another way, this paranoid thriller works best when it is paranoid, when things feel off but we can’t discern exactly why strange things are happening. Once we learn why, the tension approaches something more closely resembling pulp. Aside from Schafer and Lieu, the performers overplay everything in these chaotic set pieces, to the point where it all comes off far too silly to be terrifying.
Schafer, for what it’s worth, is the saving grace of this film, especially in these later moments. Her handle on what complexities exist within Gretchen is a grounding mechanism within the maelstrom of hammy schlock that this film becomes. Sadly, the emotional beat of Gretchen coaxing trust out of Alma using a heavy monologue about Gretchen’s mother is out of place as the eye in the middle of the storm of set pieces involving gunfights and shrieking. In a different context, it could have been a show-stopping scene.
I am a fan of Dan Stevens. And I enjoy it when he goes big. Him hamming it up in Abigail works great for that movie. So perhaps it comes off hypocritical to say I don’t like him here, but I don’t think what he is doing works for Cuckoo. The mustache-twirling in every line delivery is such an obvious tell of his character’s villainy that it is surprising that the film bothers to present as a mystery-driven horror-thriller for as long as it does. Given that once the details of this mystery are divulged it all barely hangs together anyway, his character comes off all the sillier in the end.
The long and short of it is that Cuckoo nails the setup and bombs the punchline. Some may go for the delirious energy of its final scenes, but it comes off as a letdown after Singer effectively ratchets up the tension during the film’s first hour.
Cuckoo: B-
As always, thanks for reading!
—Alex Brannan (Letterboxd, Facebook)
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