‘Cuckoo’ Review: A Superb Hunter Schafer is Menaced by a Loopy Dan Stevens in a Stylish, Enjoyably Incoherent Horror Romp
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With “Cuckoo,” German director Tilman Singer expands on the scope of his impressive 2018 debut (the demonic-possession-meets-therapeutic-improv exercise “Luz”) while retaining that film’s bird-flipping attitude toward unnecessary niceties like coherent plotting or narrative logic. Singer makes what ought to be his breakthrough with “Cuckoo,” an energetically outlandish fusion of stylish atmospherics, old-school reproductive horror and pro-switchblade advertorial. The profile of this highly enjoyable, unashamedly convoluted creepfest will be further raised by “Euphoria” star Hunter Schafer’s terrific Final Girl performance and by Dan Stevens’ hilariously eccentric villain, the second recent showcase for Stevens’ excellent spoken German after Maria Schrader’s “I’m Your Man.” Few are the films and fewer are the actors who can get such sinister mileage out of a character’s insistently Teutonic, semi-sibilant mispronunciation of the name “Gretchen.”
Gretchen (Schafer), appears, initially, to be the cuckoo. She is sent to live with her estranged father Luis (Marton Csokas), his second wife Beth (Jessica Henwick) and their mute, 8-year-old daughter, Alma (Mila Lieu), just as they are decamping to a Bavarian Alpine resort. Gretchen is surly and homesick for the U.S., and for the mother she often telephones but who never picks up her calls. Luis and Beth spent their honeymoon here years ago and became friendly with the resort’s wealthy and obviously insane owner, Herr König (Stevens) — a character so pristinely macabre that he could only have been written by a German with a finely honed instinct for how the rest of the world tends to caricature his countrymen. And now König has hired the couple to redesign the facility. Or at least that is his pretext he’s using for bringing them here.
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The hotel’s underfurnished, midcentury modern interiors are certainly a little dated, though dated to when precisely is left deliberately fuzzy. “Cuckoo’s” geographical location is clear, but its place in time far less so: Dario Mendez Acosta’s clever production design combines smartphones and noise-cancelling headsets with cassette-tape answerphones and paper filing systems in a way that constantly wrongfoots us without ever feeling at odds with the film’s internal calendar.
Almost as soon as the family arrives, weird stuff starts to go down. Most of it is centered on Gretchen, who seems increasingly hysterical to Luis and Beth, even as the physical manifestations of her encounters with a mysterious, malevolent screeching blond woman proliferate into bruises and bandages, splints and slings. When Alma suddenly develops epileptic seizure symptoms, the unsmiling doctor (Proschat Madani) at the handy but ill-defined on-site medical complex wonders if the family has recently experienced a traumatic event. All eyes swing inevitably to Gretchen. No wonder she tries to run away with attractive hotel guest Ed (Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey). Unfortunately for the would-be lesbian lovers on the run, the screaming lady — whose raspy yowl ensnares the listener in a juddering time loop — has other ideas.
Given the revelations about Gretchen’s mother and about Alma’s conception — which turns out to be a secret far worse than her merely having absorbed her twin in the womb — “Cuckoo” could loosely fit within the motherhood or grief-horror subgenres. But despite Paul Faltz’s mordantly elegant cinematography and the nice line in 1980s-style synth scoring from Simon Waskow, Singer doesn’t have anything so conceptual or “elevated” on his mind. Or if he does, it’s crowded out by the 27 other ways he wants to get freaky at that same moment, some more successful than others, and none of them even remotely explained by any of the increasingly elaborate exposition dumps that pepper the route to an unnecessarily elongated shoot-out finale.
Perverse Dr. Moreau-style genetic experimentation, copious vomiting, the spewing of some sort of pregnancy-inducing ectoplasmic goop — not to mention straggle-haired pheromonal teenagers and a locale that incorporates both the classic Overlook-style remote mountain hotel and more than one nefarious-looking cabin in the woods, “Cuckoo” has all of it, explains none of it and still somehow has time to spend with König, as he produces a little flute from his pocket and starts playing it like a latter-day Pied Piper.
To which we can only say: Stay weird, man. The only thing to fear (aside from some resurrected mythic species being Frankensteined into a family member at the whim of a rich German madman) is that when Singer’s inevitable call-up to the Hollywood big leagues happens, he doesn’t go getting all sane. Part of the massive entertainment value of his wild and unwieldy second feature is that it is refreshingly free of any kind of manifesto, except perhaps in the vaguely anti-bioessentialist idea that when it comes to surviving a barrage of expertly retooled horror tropes, Dads are useless and Moms are unreliable, and the only things you can trust are little sisters, sexy lesbian strangers and your skill with a switchblade.
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