So many modern horror movies shoot straight for the trash bin that I feel I should point out that while “Cuckoo” is a bad movie, it clearly intends to be not only good, but next-level good. Writer-director Tilman Singer doesn’t descend into pretentiousness; he’s aiming for a stylish, unnerving cult classic.
How about a little human compassion
Despite style points in a vacuum and good performances, “Cuckoo” goes wrong because it’s bleak and almost aggressively disconnected. Hunter Schafer effectively plays a socially awkward teen, Gretchen, who tries to escape into her music, but she’s stuck on vacation with her dad, stepmom and stepsister at a resort in the German backwoods. Even having awkward posture, Schafer goes all-in on this role.
(SPOILERS FOLLOW.)
Dan Stevens plays Herr Konig, a resort owner by way of “James Bond’s” Blofeld; it’s evident we’ll see him in many major films in the years to come. Jan Bluthardt plays Henry, a man whose wife has died at Konig’s hands and who wants revenge and the shuttering of the resort. If there’s ever a docu-drama about Philip K. Dick, Bluthardt should play that role.
“Cuckoo” (2024)
Director: Tilman Singer
Writer: Tilman Singer
Stars: Hunter Schafer, Jan Bluthardt, Dan Stevens
Gretchen and Henry are on the same side, but we don’t see much connection or compassion. Gretchen, who is gay (still cinema’s lazy shorthand for “different,” redundant here), also strikes up a halting romance with another vacationer, and that thread is likewise halted. “Cuckoo” remains cold, making it hard for a viewer to care.
Singer resists playing anything at a surface level, and that backfires when we gradually realize Konig is a modern Dr. Moreau, blending humans with cuckoo birds. “Cuckoo” needed a shocking revelation; instead, it’s presented as the most normal thing ever. We never see any unsettling lab work, even in a montage.
The creature design is, to put it kindly, fiscally conservative. The mutants look human, only with CGI extendable mouths when they do their disorienting shrieks. For examples of films that do compellingly horrific mutations better, see “Split” or “Alien: Romulus.”
For the birds
No doubt a deeper dive into the Cuculidae family would allow me to understand the creatures’ ability to make people experience mini-time loops. The victim hears the screech, then repeats the previous couple of seconds a few times. There’s also impregnation via goo and the rubbing of one’s legs.
And the human females impregnated by the creatures have a tendency to randomly vomit. So “Cuckoo” has the gross-out bases covered (though obviously nothing can compete with “The Substance” this year). To be fair, Singer is not merely checking boxes of scaring us (the film is never scary) or grossing us out. Instead, he’s trying to make us uneasy. That’s a difficult tightrope to walk, and he never achieves it.
Another small but hard-to-overlook misfire that adds to the film’s deficits: Gretchen’s mom – whom Gretchen has left back in America while traveling with her dad and his new family — uses a landline and cassette-tape answering machine. Because “Cuckoo” is a “What’s going on?” movie, and because it has those mini-time loops, an astute viewer is cued to think of time warps.
Instead, the answering machine signifies nothing; Singer simply settled on out-of-date tech so Gretchen could later gain possession of a physical answering-machine tape. There probably is a way to make the same plot point via digital tech, but he went with the clearer route. In a movie that encourages us to pick up every detail to merely understand what’s happening, a totally nonsensical object is poor presentation.
Someday, film historians will look back at the first quarter of the 21st century as an awkward time when storytellers still used 20th century tech in their plots rather than figuring out the time-appropriate way to do it. “Cuckoo” is hopefully one of the last stragglers.