Cuckoo (2024)
dir. Tilman Singer
Rated: R
image: ©2024 Neon
There’s a very distinct difference between a movie shrouding itself in tantalizing mystery, so that the audience can fill in the blanks using their own imagination, and a movie being so opaque about its plot machinations that it’s indistinguishable from shoddy storytelling. German writer/director Tilman Singer’s second feature, Cuckoo, strives for the former, but, because of its confusing and nonsensical plot, lands squarely in the domain of the latter.
Set in a picturesque resort town in the gorgeous (and gorgeously photographed by cinematographer Paul Faltz) Bavarian Alps, Cuckoo centers on teenager Gretchen. She’s an American who moves with her father, Luis, stepmother, Beth, and mute younger stepsister, Alma, to Germany. The adults have come to Bavaria to begin planning and construction of a new hotel. Their partner is the enigmatic Herr König, a resort owner whom Luis and Beth met eight years earlier while staying on his property for their honeymoon. Herr König and his former guests struck up a friendship during the honeymoon and have become business partners.
Gretchen is a typical teenager: sullen, brooding, antagonistic towards her father and resentful of her stepmother and stepsister. She leaves voicemails for her mother about hating Germany and longing to return to America.
It’s hard to blame her. Immediately upon arriving at Herr König’s resort, Gretchen gets the sense that things aren’t quite what they seem. Strange things begin to happen. As an olive branch, and to give her something to do as a way to adjust, Herr König offers Gretchen a job working the reception desk/hotel store. One of the first guests she encounters vomits all over the floor before wandering off in a daze.
Director Singer leaves story details as vague as possible while ratcheting up the gore and jump scares of his exercise in horror. He drops us into Cuckoo with a disorienting opening sequence in which we see a different teenage girl running from the resort into the woods while (what we assume are) her parents scream at each other in the next room.
I can’t count the number of times Cuckoo flummoxed me with incongruous plot details, hazy character motivation – especially of the actual monster on the loose – and characters behaving in ways for no other reason than the movie needed them to in order to advance the plot. The simplest and most low-stakes (but still perplexingly frustrating) of these plot details is the revelation that Gretchen hasn’t been leaving voicemails for her mother, but instead has been leaving messages for her on their shared answering machine. You know, the kind that virtually vanished overnight once cell phones were almost universally adopted.
Cuckoo never bothers to explain why this is the case, so we’re left to distractingly ponder it as the movie marches forward toward its horrific climax. I’ll have to very carefully dance around the central conceit at the heart of Cuckoo’s terrifying monster, because to divulge it would be tantamount to ruining for first-time viewers the secret at the heart of The Sixth Sense. Singer ham-handedly gives us a metaphor midway through the film when his Herr König delivers a speech to Gretchen about the noble cuckoo, its unusual parenting methods, and his zeal as a preservationist.
The monster, which comes in the form of a creepy hooded woman, possesses the ability to unleash a disorienting shriek which causes the victim to replay the last few seconds on a loop, rendering them helpless to defend themselves.
The best bits of Cuckoo are the ones in which the terror takes the lead and poor Gretchen is reduced to replaying the last few seconds of her life on a loop. Jump scares are sometimes derided as the lowest form of provocation in horror movies, but Singer employs them wonderfully here. The movie successfully shocked my system on several occasions, giving me the feeling you get when you wake from a nightmare in which you’re falling from a great height.
The actual motivations of the monster – and the nuts and bolts of its powers in one particular scene – aren’t handled nearly as well. This thing is fixated on Gretchen, but we never really understand why. Our suspicions lie with the strange Herr König, but the movie contradicts itself (as an ill-conceived attempt to throw us off his trail, I suspect) when König tries to keep her out of harm’s way in the early going.
Those previously mentioned nuts and bolts in a car crash sequence are the picture’s logical nadir. Up to this point, the movie has established that in order to fall under the spell of the monster’s shriek, you must be able to hear it. The shriek is what triggers the disorientation and time loops.
So, I was really confused when Gretchen begins experiencing these effects in a speeding car with the monster nowhere in sight. (Gretchen is attempting an escape from her father and the creepy resort in the car of a French woman named Ed, a resort guest whose sole purpose in the movie is to offer a way out for Gretchen.) The disorientation leads to the crash and an attempt by the monster to kill Gretchen, but how? There is no way these two would have heard the shriek from where we eventually see the creature, but it makes for an unsettling supernatural sequence, which is all that Singer seems to care about.
I haven’t mentioned Henry yet, a man who introduces himself to Gretchen as a police officer investigating this mysterious hooded woman. Henry, it turns out, has a personal connection to the case, and he’ll stop at nothing to get to the bottom of what’s happening. He and Gretchen team up to do exactly that.
They get their answer in the form of one of the most egregious and unforgivable exposition dumps in recent movie memory. The resort doctor, who is assisting König in his nefarious schemes, inexplicably describes every last detail of the process to two other people who already have the information that she’s so meticulously presenting (for our benefit, not theirs).
We’ve seen earlier that Gretchen’s stepsister, Alma, is somehow involved. This revelation only led to numerous questions buzzing in my brain that Cuckoo never bothers to answer. Are Luis and Beth (who the movie treats as superficially as it does Ed) involved? If not, it’s certainly convenient that they dreamt of returning to Herr König’s resort to help him build a new hotel.
The film’s greatest strength lies in its performances. Hunter Schafer, whom I’ve recently discovered in the HBO series Euphoria (yes, I am woefully late to the Euphoria party) is wonderful as Gretchen. She transforms from sullen teenager to terror-struck final girl with expertise. Schafer’s expressive face often says more in Cuckoo than words could convey.
As Herr König, English actor Dan Stevens adds to his weirdo repertoire following his staid breakout performance as cousin Matthew Crawley on Downton Abbey. Stevens – sporting a deliciously thick German accent and a penchant for playing a wooden flute – adds a wonderful touch of off-kilter creepiness to Cuckoo. Knowing that the actor is “down to get weird” on screen, and after his lead turn in the bonkers (and wildly entertaining) 2017-2019 FX series Legion, seeing his name on a project is enough to make me interested.
With Cuckoo, Stevens, Schafer, and some wonderfully executed trippy special effects do the lion’s share of the heavy lifting. The tiny time loops that characters find themselves trapped in over the course of the film are clever and inventive. Equally clever and inventive, and also fairly terrifying to boot, are the effects employed for the movie’s single-minded monster. Where Cuckoo falters is in the execution of the story. Singer’s script feels like a promising first draft that nobody had the time to give a second look at after the funding for filming was secured.
Why it got 2.5 stars:
- As good as the acting is from the two main leads, and as inventive and trippy as the special effects are, they don’t make up for Cuckoo’s lackluster story or the way director Tilman Singer botches its execution.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- As an example of the point immediately above, there is one scene in which Gretchen describes how her stepsister exhibited Vanishing Twin Syndrome in the womb. This tidbit has no bearing on anything in the movie. It’s included, I’m assuming, because it’s a creepy thing to have in your movie.
- I did enjoy the moments — like when Gretchen answers the hotel telephone and Herr König lets a few things slip before he realizes he’s talking to the wrong person — in which Singer, because he ties us so closely to Gretchen’s point of view, builds the sense that things are happening behind the scenes, immediately out of our view.
- The best laugh of the movie comes when Gretchen asks König why he wants her family there, and he responds with, “You’re here because your family belongs here.” It’s at this point that Gretchen responds to her family by shouting, “That’s a weird fucking way to phrase it!”
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- Rae and I saw this at the Texas Theatre early on a Friday evening. There were exactly four of us in the audience. There seemed to be some AC issues, because a big fan was on and one of the entrance/exit doors was open, throwing a huge rectangle of light onto the screen. Luckily a theater employee came in a few minutes after the movie started and closed the door. Eventually, after the AC apparently came back to full strength, someone came by to turn off the fan.
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The FFC’s political soapbox
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