Writer/director Tilman Singer is not interested in holding your hand. He’ll give you every piece of information you need to crack the narrative code of his films, but the expository monologue that sinks so many genre pictures is something his work will not likely ever utilize. His debut feature, Luz, tells a single location tale of an extrasensorily perceptive woman and her tense showdown with a body-hopping demon, but until you watch it a second or third time, it’s admittedly easy to get lost in the sauce (while the sauce remains delicious).
His latest, Cuckoo, has a more expansive narrative ambition. It’s a larger setting with more characters and a wider timeframe, but the cinematic cards remain very close to Singer’s chest. It’s clear enough that a single viewing still makes sense, but it’s not until repeat viewings that the film’s calculated brilliance comes to the forefront. I’ve now seen it three times, and on the third round there were still so many new things to discover.
You’re goddamn right I’ll be seeing it a fourth time (and purchasing the disc — fingers crossed for 4K).
This elusive (but never cryptic) style of storytelling suits the material brilliantly, placing the viewer into the same position as the protagonist. There’s very little by way of dramatic irony, and for a film like Cuckoo, namely one that isn’t classically scary, this provides for a persistent and oppressive feeling of unease reminiscent of the “something is up but I can’t quite put my finger on it” vibe of films like The Wicker Man or The Stepford Wives. As such, it’s a movie that’s hard to spoil, but also one that benefits from the viewer going in blind, at least for the first round.
The film follows Gretchen (Hunter Schafer), a teenager whose father, stepmother, and half-sister are moving to a property in the Bavarian Alps, where they will be assisting in the construction of a resort under the watchful eye of the landlord, Herr König (Dan Stevens). Gretchen is about as interested in this sudden relocation as she is in spending time with her father’s second family. The tensions are high, exponentially so due to the fact that Gretchen is just 17, an age where most young people need support and don’t yet know how to communicate it. As indicated by a series of gut-wrenching phone calls to her former home in the USA, Gretchen clearly wishes to return to her old life. It’s in these scenes that we get to see Schafer at her most powerful. Cuckoo is a film that goes well beyond the peculiar promise of its opening reel, diving head first into the realm of the bizarre and grotesque. Yet as the story escalates and we learn more about why Herr König demands the resort lock up by 10 p.m., why he plays his little flute on the edge of the forest, or why he seems obsessed with opening a line of communication with Gretchen’s half-sister Alma, it’s the performances that keep Cuckoo from falling from the nest, so to speak.
It’s a Frankenstein tale, a family drama, and showdown between a young woman in need of familial love and a man who will stop at nothing to see that his brood get everything they need. I cannot say more.
The cliche that there are no small parts is very much the case here, and Singer has smartly chosen performers who cast a singular image. Even characters with no real presence will populate the frame of a scene in such a way as to enrich repeat viewings, and as the savvy viewer pieces together whose who and what’s what, it’s these little visual bookmarks that help the story to gel.
We all know that Dan Stevens, character actor of the gods, has become a genre staple, and outside of his starring role in The Guest, this might be him at his most powerful. Many a character actor will do a silly accent, mug for the camera, and call it a day, but Stevens digs deeper and goes much, much further. Herr König is a man of certain tastes and desires, and Stevens is able to milk a wealth of motivation from material that, if interpreted wrong, could’ve fallen into camp territory. This is assisted, of course, by Schafer, who may be giving THE performance of 2024. Once cannot play detachment without being fully attached to the material and Schafer elevates the disaffected teenager trope with a wisdom that betrays her age.
I must also throw a few words of praise to Jan Bluthardt and Marton Csokas, as an unhinged cop and a distant father, respectively, for also digging past tropes and finding new character depth in molds that we’ve seen before.
While watching Cuckoo, I found myself reminded of ‘80s euro horror, but with a contemporary edge. The look of it (which I was lucky to see in 35mm) is evocative of a VHS found in a box in the back corner of an abandoned video store. It feels like the kind of movie that no one knows about except for a few cool people who stumbled across it in some arcane way. Yet here we are in a world where something so bizarre has gotten a wide release. We’ve all heard of it. We’re all that cool cinephile who got to see something that, in another inferior universe, might have been lost to time. In a year that has been bubbling over with fantastic and innovative horror (Strange Darling, In A Biolent Nature, Late Night With the Devil, Longlegs), Cuckoo is the very best.
Directed by Tilman Singer
Written by Tilman Singer
Starring Hunter Schafer, Dan Stevens, Jessica Henwick, Mila Lieu
Rated R, 102 minutes
