CUCKOO

After the first trailer and buzz out of South by Southwest hit the net, Cuckoo seemed prime to be another sleeper horror hit for Neon, who has been having an absolutely stellar year so far.

The film's release date got pushed back from May to August and my anticipation grew and grew as it got closer and closer. And yet as I found myself watching writer/director Tilman Singer’s Cuckoo, all I could say to myself was ‘Where did this go wrong?’.

Starring Euphoria alum Hunter Schafer in her first big lead role, the film starts off with Schafer’s Gretchen, a young woman whose remarried father brings her to a remote German Alps resort, much to her resentment. After her dad’s weird boss Mr. König (Dan Stevens) shows interest in her mute half sister, she begins to understand that something is off with where they are staying and the inhabitants of this small town. Sensing that their is a danger lurking in the resorts surroundings, Gretchen begins to dig a little deep until something sinister starts digging back.

Admittedly, the first 20 to 30 minutes of the film are brilliant, creating an eerie and very unsettling atmosphere in this beautiful little town. Director Tilman Singer said he was adamant on using abandoned buildings in and around North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany and it works perfectly because it adds to that level of uneasiness right from the get-go. The intrigue had set in and I was convinced I was going to love this, like the majority.

I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again, 2024 is the year of Dan Stevens. And even though I do not love this movie at all, Stevens once again, as with everything else he’s been in, steals the show.

Playing both a charming and charismatic leader of this new ‘Architectural’ project, Stevens bodes well here and is playing to his strengths, even when it feels like he is being given nothing from the script. As the story unfolds, and his true colors start to come out, he and Schafer play really well off of each other - especially during the climax of the third act which is absolutely batshit crazy.

Amidst the set design (or lack therefore of) and the two strong performances of the leads, where Cuckoo falls off the rails is its lack of ability to stick to a cohesive story that makes sense.

It’s thematic identity is so blurred and it never knows what it wants to be, that it was hard for me to give a shit at all about what was going on - quite frankly because I didn’t know what was going on for the majority of the movie.

Sadly, due to that, nothing ever ends up feeling scary or off putting. I anticipated so many great scares, especially with the wonderful sound design and bleakness of the set design but, my god, at a point, I was rolling my eyes because of how slow everything felt for what people have called “a bold and bizarre psychological horror’.

It aims to bend itself from science-fiction horror into a comedic B-style horror, then back into a quasi-creature-feature, but never really sticking any kind of landing for ANY of those.

It it obvious that director Singer has a great grasp on the works of such as directors as David Lynch, Canada’s own David Cronenberg and more recently Jordan Peele, because this film feels very homage heavy towards their works, but at least with their works, a competent and cohesive grasp on what is actually happening and a conclusion become evident after 80 or 90 minutes.

Beautiful to look at but severely lacking in the script department, Cuckoo is an arthouse project gone mad, thanks to its own devices and the lack of a revelation to what seemed like a very cool premise. Much like an actual Cuckoo bird, let’s hope this one just flies away never to be seen again.