‘Cuckoo’ Review: Hunter Schafer and Dan Stevens Keep You Glued Even When This Reproductive Horror Careens Off the Rails

David Rooney
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Ornithologists will no doubt roll their eyes and scoff, “Who doesn’t know that?” But it was news to me that cuckoos, aside from inspiring those infernal kitsch clocks you want to smash once an hour, are also what’s known as brood parasites. That means they’re either too busy or too lazy or too evil to raise their own young, so they drop their eggs in the nests of other birds and let them do the parenting instead. Respect. German writer-director Tilman Singer folds that fascinating nugget of bird arcana into a reproductive horror scenario that’s more strange than coherent in his second feature, naturally titled Cuckoo.

There’s more than the seed of an entertainingly trippy freakout here, applying the peculiar breeding habits of the cuckoo to the demented plan of a self-described preservationist, bent on somehow or other building an assembly line of enhanced propagation using young “nestlings.”

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At its best, the movie is kind of like The Stepford Wives meets Rosemary’s Baby, with side orders of Cronenberg, J-Horror and Lynch. The mixed-bag 2021 film False Positive, with Ilana Glazer, Justin Theroux and Pierce Brosnan, took a more clinical route to a comparable nightmare in which men seek to control women’s reproductive systems.

Not that the fine points of the breeding program ever acquire a huge amount of clarity in this May release from Neon, premiering in Berlin. But when the mad German gyno-meddler is played with undiluted oiliness by Dan Stevens, tooting that sorry stepchild of the woodwind family, the recorder, to exercise his insidious mind-control maneuvers, you can overlook a little narrative confusion.

The other big plus in Cuckoo’s favor is the magnetic Hunter Schafer, making good on the promise of her work on Euphoria in her first big-screen lead role, in ways that her supporting turn in the Hunger Games prequel could only tease. Finding an ideal balance between vulnerability and sharp survival instincts, the rangy style icon is a commanding presence as Gretchen, an American about to turn 18 and seriously underwhelmed to leave behind her friends and the home she loves to go live in the German Alps with her dad Luis (Márton Csókás) and his new family. Anyone who doesn’t guess instantly about the reality behind Gretchen’s calls home to her mother has probably never seen a horror movie.

Gretchen feels no connection either to her father’s new wife, Beth (Jessica Henwick), or Beth’s 7-year-old daughter, Alma (Mimi Lieu). She finds it tedious that Alma is mute and only communicates with gestures or a voice app, though she does give her stepsister points for having eaten her sibling in utero, in a case of Vanishing Twin Syndrome. Whether that’s essential to the plot or just another bit of cool weirdness thrown in for the heck of it is open to debate.

Singer nails the intriguing set-up as the not-quite-blended family is greeted by Alpine resort owner Herr König (Stevens), who will be Luis’ new boss in a project to expand the guest accommodations. König is a creep for the ages, and Stevens has a lip-smacking good time being solicitous but casually skeevy with Gretchen while showing an inordinate interest in Alma. The family’s new home is inviting enough, but something about the place and everyone in it is a little off.

Nevertheless, Gretchen accepts König’s offer of a job at the resort, working the reception desk with Trixie (Greta Fernández), who’s sleeping with local cop Erik (Konrad Singer). As for the place, its veneer of comfortable tourism doesn’t hide the air of something unwholesome, especially when female guests start randomly throwing up.

Cycling home from work at night against König’s advice, Gretchen is pursued by a scary hooded woman (Kalin Morrow). She sustains a head injury while seeking refuge at the local hospital, where Alma has been admitted following a seizure. The head medic, Dr. Bonomo (Proschat Madani), is no reassuring presence; she’s indebted to König, who funded the chronic disease center that she runs. Gretchen also meets Henry Landau (Jan Bluthardt), who claims to be a detective investigating strange occurrences in the area.

It emerges that Luis and Beth first met König when they honeymooned at the resort eight years earlier, and the chumminess of the two men suggests that Gretchen’s father might be in on the nefarious plan. That would also seem to apply less ambiguously to police officer Erik.

The atmosphere is sufficiently unsettling to make Gretchen flee when the opportunity presents itself with flirty resort guest Ed (Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey), who wants to take her to Paris. But that escape attempt ends badly when the hooded woman’s appearance on the road causes an accident. Badly banged up and back in hospital, Gretchen finds herself with only Landau and her trusty switchblade as allies once König starts making ominous pronouncements like, “The adolescent needs to be trained.”

But what of the young women summoned by König’s recorder, who screech like pod people right out of Invasion of the Body Snatchers? What of the quivering ears and palpitating throats that cause ear-splitting sonic vibrations and juddering visuals, prompting time-loop repetitions? And what’s going on with Beth and her sudden nausea?

Once König drops any pretense of masking his villainy, deaths quickly start mounting up, but any semblance of plot coherence has been jettisoned by the time König and Landau get locked in an armed faceoff, with Gretchen caught in the middle and that hooded banshee still popping up at inconvenient moments. Only the salvation of an unexpected sisterly connection between Gretchen and Alma makes a lick of sense.

Dynamically shot in widescreen on 35mm by DP Paul Faltz, who also gave Luz its stylish, trance-like visuals, and laced with eclectic ‘80s pop that often plays against tone, this is certainly the work of a confident director — even if his more narrative-driven sophomore feature is often just as baffling as his first. But in Schafer and Stevens, it has two fiercely compelling adversaries. It’s ultimately too silly to be truly chilling, but with Neon behind it, Cuckoo might just be cuckoo enough to draw some cult attention.

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