Coming on the heels of Longlegs and Immaculate, director Tilman Singer’s Cuckoo feels like the next phase of Neon’s plan to dominate this summer of horror. The movie’s haunting atmosphere and gorgeous cinematography make it seem primed to tap into Hollywood’s current obsession with unsettling features running on spooky vibes alone. But for all of its hype and a solid performance from its leads, Cuckoo suffers from a lack of thematic coherence. It’s definitely the strongest of Neon’s recent scary movies, but that isn’t exactly a high bar to clear.
Set in a corner of the German Alps where few foreigners tend to wander, Cuckoo follows as sullen, American teenager Gretchen (Hunter Schafer) is forced to move in with her estranged father, Luis (Marton Csokas), and his new family. With all of Gretchen’s beloved bandmates and treasured possessions back in the States, she can’t help but feel alone living with her stepmother Beth (Jessica Henwick) and mute half-sister Alma (Mila Lieu). And while Gretchen doesn’t try to hide her distaste at being uprooted for Luis’ job expanding a secluded resort owned by Herr König (Dan Stevens), she only feels comfortable expressing the depths of her sadness in voicemails to her unseen mother.
As Cuckoo first opens, Gretchen’s already dead set on fleeing from her new home where everyone seems a bit off — especially Stevens’ hammy König, who insists on the moody teen working as his receptionist. The way the resort’s handful of guests sometimes wander around in stupors before becoming violently ill is enough to make Gretchen suspect something is amiss. But it isn’t until she has a strange run-in with a shrieking woman (Kalin Morrow) that Gretchen realizes leaving her family behind might be a matter of life and death.
Singer and cinematographer Paul Faltz take their time infusing Cuckoo with a hazy sense of dread reminiscent of Rosemary’s Baby and Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala’s Goodnight Mommy, another film about children distrustful of their parents’ bizarre behavior. Gretchen’s the only person who can see past the resort’s picturesque environment to appreciate how weird everything about the sterile, largely empty place is. And after her encounter with the screaming woman, Gretchen’s sense of alienation from her family only intensifies because of how difficult it is for them to understand (or believe) her confusing account of what happened.
Cuckoo uses time loops to leave Gretchen (and viewers) disoriented — one of the film’s more novel tricks and one that becomes increasingly effective because of how cool those sequences look. Just as moments of panic sweat-drenched action seem to be winding down, reality begins to pulsate, and Cuckoo flings you back right into the thick of Gretchen being chased by …something. But as that something gets closer and closer to finally getting its hands on Gretchen, Cuckoo starts to overexplain itself in a way that makes the film feel uncertain of how to reveal its muddled central mystery.
As a series of alarming chases through the woods, Cuckoo is a fantastic showcase of Singer’s ability to conjure atmospheric unease and Schafer’s chops as a rough-and-tumble final girl armed with a switchblade. But as a story — one that gestures toward ideas about reproductive horror, paternalism, and returning to nature — Cuckoo doesn’t exactly hang together the way it could if Singer focused more on narrative cohesion than disturbing lore.
In its final act, as it pulls out all the stops to make Gretchen’s fight for her life feel perilous, Cuckoo tries to weave all of its themes together by spelling them out. This makes the film feel excessively complicated, convoluted by half-baked details that would have been better shown rather than explicated,
In Neon’s growing canon of arthouse thrillers, Cuckoo stands out as one of the studio’s more original features, and the movie’s visual artistry might be enough to convince some horror lovers that its last-minute expositional denseness is actually a sign of brilliance. But in its dizzied rush to tell you everything that’s on its mind, Cuckoo ends up revealing itself to be a shining example of how, sometimes, movies like this are served better by doing a little less.
Cuckoo also stars Jan Bluthardt, Greta Fernández, Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey, Konrad Singer, and Proschat Madani. The film is in theaters now.
