The first obvious parallel to Tilman Singer’s horror-thriller Cuckoo is The Shining. A family — Luis (Marton Csokas), the patriarch, Gretchen (Hunter Schafer), his teenage daughter, Beth (Jessica Henwick), the stepmom, and Alma (Mila Lieu), Beth’s young, mute daughter — has packed up not just from the city but from America, and is heading out to the Bavarian Alps. The adults, both architects, have been hired to design a new tourist resort for the impenetrable Herr König (Dan Stevens).
The slick and immaculately dressed German entrepreneur has the family stay at an Alpine resort, and even offers Gretchen a job at the front desk, a position she reluctantly accepts in hopes of getting together the funds that will allow her to return to the States. Her employment quickly reveals some strange goings-on, however. For one, Herr König implements strict, seemingly arbitrary rules regarding when his new employee should leave the premises. For another, the women staying at the resort have a habit of wandering around in a daze before spilling the contents of their stomachs all over the floor. Something is obviously amiss, though everyone around her seems to shrug it off for reasons that can be read as both benign and sinister.
But the weirdness doesn’t stop there: staying late one night (against Herr König’s advice/orders), Gretchen is accosted by a crazed woman dressed in a coat and sunglasses covering glowing red eyes on her way home and only narrowly escapes by finding refuge in a hospital. And as if that isn’t enough, she also appears to occasionally slip into a kind of time loop, where events play out over and over while the world around warps in a way which suggests an instability that threatens to tear apart the very fabric of reality.
Over the course of its 102 minutes, the mystery at the heart of Cuckoo slowly unravels — spoiler alert: Herr König turns out to be a bad guy — but not before pitting Schafer’s 17-year-old character against the people around her, who, predictably, don’t believe her when she tells them there are strange things happening. Gretchen is at odds with the other characters in more ways than one, though. In fact, she appears to have stepped out of a film that’s twice her age. Moody and angst-ridden, she spends her free time listening to music and plucking away at a bass guitar in true unstuck-in-time Gen-X fashion.
Of course, our main character’s issues began way before the opening reel. Like most teenagers in American cinema, Gretchen resents her father’s marriage to a woman who isn’t her mother — she even makes glib remarks about her stepsister’s inability to speak. Her biological mother passed away, and the rebellious teen desperately clings to the memory of her by listening to her mother’s voicemail greeting and pretend-conversing with her in moments of emotional distress. Singer compounds the central mystery with more emotional moments like these, but the relative ludicrousness of the plot — not a negative, to be clear — clashes with the predictable indie-drama beats scattered throughout. (The latter is a negative, however.)
The film neither sufficiently grounds itself in the emotional reality of its main character to work on a character level, nor does it seem particularly worried about playing off the audience’s fears. The dense pine woods that make up the Bavarian backdrop induce some brief twig-cracking anxiety, but Singer struggles to reconcile the genre potential of this setting with the lighter tone of the dialogue the film often veers into. And though it frequently hints at Kubrick’s 1980 horror classic, one wishes for the overt ridiculousness of something like The Red Queen Kills Seven Times (1972) — the murdering maniac makes her escape in a tiny white Beetle — or the Evil Dead films. Instead, stuck as it is somewhere between respectability, levity, and terror, Cuckoo unfortunately ends up failing to pull off any of these convincingly.
DIRECTOR: Tilman Singer; CAST: Hunter Schafer, Dan Stevens, Mila Lieu, Martin Csokas; DISTRIBUTOR: NEON; IN THEATERS: August 9; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 42 min.
Originally published as part of Fantasia Fest 2024 — Dispatch 2.
