Weird, Fantastical Horror You’ll Go Cuckoo For
After Tilman Singer’s (Luz) Cuckoo concluded at this year’s Sleeping Giant Festival, my partner remarked, “I liked that.” I liked it too, and broadly, that’s as clear a formal assessment as I can give. Cuckoo, Singer’s sophomore feature, is poised to polarize. It’s an incomprehensible hodgepodge of distinct horror ideals blended with unkempt frenzy. Conceptually a kitchen sink of subgenres—part supernatural, part body horror, part slasher—Cuckoo bludgeons its way through disparate beats, never quite amounting to a unified whole while still ensuring it’s a ton of chaotic fun getting there.
Hunter Schafer’s Gretchen is en route to a rural German resort with her father, Luis (Martin Csokas), stepmother Beth (Jessica Henwick), and sister Alma (Mila Lieu). Expositionally, Cuckoo is grounded in an uncanny reality, awkwardly—though deliberately—merging earnest pathos with weirdo behavior. No one, especially Dan Stevens’ Mr. König, behaves quite as they should, lurching in a kind of Philip Kaufman-esque Invasion of the Body Snatchers pantomime of how human beings are supposed to act.
It’s Singer having their erudite horror cake and eating it too, and while an unevenly paced final act threatens to bludgeon the momentum, Cuckoo is largely successful. At turns incoherent and staggeringly obvious, its sun-soaked German countryside calls to mind Dogtooth, It Follows, and the previously mentioned Body Snatchers. Not a bad league to be in.
Cuckoo regularly arrives where you expect it to even if, retrospectively, you’re not quite sure how those expectations even came to be. The in-quotes story follows Gretchen in perennial distress. Her mother has passed away and she’s been shuttled off to an enigmatic German resort while her father and stepmother endeavor to plan a new development there. Alma doesn’t speak, and shortly after arriving, suffers severe seizures, falling into the clutches of an all-too-eager hospital staff.
Gretchen, meanwhile, dabbles in queer romance, snark, and some classic theft to find a way out. She wants to be back in the United States, playing music in her old house like an inverted, horror-fueled Max Keeble’s Big Move. Soon after arriving, however, Gretchen is attacked by a strange old woman who howls in the night and charges forth like a beast. No one believes her.
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Then, Gretchen continues to get attacked, shifting between Gen-Z incredulity and effective heartbreak at how little her predicament seems to resonate with those closest to her. No one cares that she was almost killed, though Stevens’ Mr. König cautions her it might happen again. Gretchen’s response to her plight is the greatest source of Cuckoo’s humor, such as when she exasperatedly gestures at Mr. König, dubious that no one can see how conspicuously evil he is.
That protracted third act does threaten to erode goodwill, notably when that humor fails to mesh with more considerable stakes, bloodier violence, and an emotional core that, while earnest, is hard to assess in the midst of monster movie peculiarities.
Cuckoo, I can confidently say, is Neon’s best horror release this year starring a Euphoria cast member. It’s committed enough to its discordant rhythm to charm and frighten, even if it doesn’t always seem sure of what it’s trying to say. It’s weird, it’s brazen, it’s funny, and it’s even a little tender. Once you’ve seen it, you might just go a little cuckoo for it.
Summary
Incomprehensibility breeds nightmares in Tilman Singer’s bold, stylish, exquisitely fun Cuckoo.
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