Cuckoo's stylish horror might've been better if it'd made even less sense

Tilman Singer’s debut feature Luz didn’t hide behind its style, exactly. But it did swaddle its weirdness in a comforting blanket of fuzz and neon. A film-school thesis so promising it was picked up for distribution abroad, Luz is the kind of movie that serves as a teaser for what a director could do if someone gave them just a little bit more money to execute their vision. That happened for Singer with Cuckoo, as Neon allowed the German filmmaker to hire name actors and upgrade from 16mm to 35mm film for his second feature. Don’t worry—the result is just as eccentric. But it does lift the fog, which makes its weak points more visible.

Instead, Cuckoo breathes in the fresh mountain air of the Bavarian Alps, where 17-year-old Gretchen (Hunter Schafer) is not happy at all to be moving in with her estranged father Luis (Marton Csokas), stepmom Beth (Jessica Henwick), and mute half-sister Alma (Mila Lieu). The baseline situation is already unusual: Luis tells his daughter that he and Beth are there to renovate a mountain lodge, but their only connection to the place is that Alma was conceived there eight years ago. The guy who owns the resort, Herr König (Dan Stevens), is a real weirdo, too. 

Stevens always plays a weirdo, even when he’s not supposed to. His love of deranged expressions and zany accents—his German inflection in this movie is impeccable—makes him an ideal co-conspirator for Singer. Both men commit to a bit with the intensity of a dog chomping down on a favorite chew toy, and both will rip it to pieces before letting it go. This is especially true as Cuckoo reveals an end game that’s both utterly bonkers and disappointingly literal.

The fun part happens along the way, as Gretchen has a series of escalating encounters with a sinister woman in a terrible wig with the power to hurtle her victims into a vibrating time loop with the power of her unholy screeching. The first time she appears, it’s startlingly strange; everyone certainly seems to think Gretchen has lost it when she describes her experiences to her family and the employees of the hotel. (That’s one interpretation of the film’s title.) Singer and cinematographer Paul Faltz have fun creating the rippling effect of the bird lady’s scream using practical in-camera effects, and the camera flits around the dark, shabby corners of the hotel like a bird. (That’s the other.) 

Watching Schafer in action is enjoyable as well. Like her fellow modern-day scream queen Maika Monroe, she has an agile physicality that makes you believe she could escape from a killer without tripping over a tree branch. She’d get back up, anyway, as Gretchen does throughout the film. The character gets knocked down, thrown around, chased, and startled, her long limbs flapping like wings (again, this movie can be quite literal at times) as she stumbles and rights herself. At one point, she breaks her arm, and has an unwieldy cast impeding her movement for the rest of the film. 

But Gretchen keeps on pushing, building momentum to a finale that’s goopy and bizarre and blunt and kind of a letdown, given the mind-bending promise of everything that’s come before. Cuckoo ends up explaining itself a little too much, a throat-clearing impulse that leaves the film flailing as it battles competing desires to fuck with the audience and wrap up the story in a semi-coherent way. There’s just enough here to make it a satisfying watch for snobs and sickos, but it leaves more questions than it answers, in both good ways and bad. On the one hand, there’s nothing wrong with a good “WTF?” experience. On the other, Cuckoo sort of makes sense and sort of doesn’t, and these half measures almost make you long for something that makes no sense at all.

Director: Tilman Singer
Writer: Tilman Singer
Starring: Hunter Schafer, Jan Bluthardt, Marton Csokas, Jessica Henwick, Dan Stevens
Release Date: August 9, 2024