In 2019, writer/director Tilman Singer made an enormous splash with his possession thriller Luz. It’s as much an homage to the horror films of the ‘60s and ‘70s, evoking the look via cinematography and art direction, while telling a unique story that — pun intended — gets under your skin. Since then, Singer’s follow-up tale shot quickly up the personal anticipated list, so much so that this reviewer included what became known as the horror/thriller Cuckoo in a 2023 episode of Meet Me at the Movies discussion on most anticipated films, only to be sorely disappointed when the film would be delayed until the 2024 Berlin International Film Festival where it held its world premiere. Now, after a series of screenings at other North American festivals, Singer’s Cuckoo joins the 2024 Fantasia International Film Festival as it has its Montreal premiere. The question is: was it worth the wait? With all the hype of a sophomore outing, Singer’s Cuckoo doesn’t contain the dread or the mystery of his prior work, but that’s because the film is largely predictable given that it tells you the central concept via the title. This might seem like a letdown, but there are enough secrets within, executed through unnerving sequences, performances, and cinematography, that tension rises nonetheless.
L-R: Greta Fernández as Trixie and Hunter Schafer as Gretchen in CUCKOO Photo Credit: Felix Dickinson, Photo Courtesy of NEON.
After the death of her mother, Gretchen (Hunter Schafer) is forced to move with her father Luis (Marton Csokas), stepmother Beth (Jessica Henwick), and stepsister Alma (Mila Lieu), to the German Alps as Luis and Beth set about to help develop a new resort for friend/resort owner Herr König (Dan Stevens). Between existing familial tensions and a desire to go back home, Gretchen struggles to adjust to life within her new circumstance. All of this is made worse when a strange occurrence one evening ends in injury for Gretchen, but no one believes her about what happened. Determined to get away, Gretchen soon discovers that leaving the nest is not as simple as walking out the door.
**The following paragraph will explain the title and connect it slightly to the narrative. If that will feel like a spoiler to you, please skip ahead one paragraph.**
Dan Stevens as Herr König in CUCKOO Photo Credit: Felix Dickinson, Photo Courtesy of NEON.
For the unfamiliar, the cuckoo bird is an avian who, simply put, places their own eggs in the unattended nest of another bird to be raised. Their natural instinct is to either place or replace an egg, upon which, when hatched, the cuckoo chick may remove any siblings so as to hoard resources for themselves. This is an entirely natural phenomenon for the cuckoo bird, though differing subspecies of the cuckoo will engage in different actions when nestling their eggs regarding timing. The point, if you’ll indulge, is that where Singer borrowed from supernatural lore in his initial feature-length tale, with Cuckoo, he’s borrowing from the natural world. This makes the otherworldly elements slightly more grounded and the questions that surround the tale all the stranger and more unsettling when one considers the very real human emotional aspects of the narrative.
What does this mean?
**End of potential spoiler paragraph.**
Greta Fernández as Trixie in CUCKOO Photo Credit: Felix Dickinson, Photo Courtesy of NEON.
In many horror tales, the protagonist is rarely believed. The spirit that goes bump in the night, the killer back on the streets, the book of the damned from which one should never read: these are things that, upon calling them out, the protagonist is left often ridiculed, leaving them even more vulnerable. Within Cuckoo, Singer constructs a story about a family already in disarray, a blended family in discord between the things we know and the things we can only imagine. Singer purposefully doesn’t give us backstory on Gretchen and her father, trusting the performances from Schafer (The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes) and Csokas (The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring) to convey the distance between them. All we really know is that Gretchen was living with her mother, her mother recently passed, and there’s no relationship between Gretchen and her step-family. Is it because Gretchen seems to not want one or that Henwick’s (Glass Onion; The Matrix Resurrections) performance as Beth implies someone uninterested in Luis’s life before her? What we do know is that even before anything truly creepy occurs, both children are respectively viewed as being similar to a cuckoo — Gretchen in the eyes of her stepmother as she’s stealing resources from Alma, and Alma in in the eyes of Gretchen with whom she now much share resources. Thus, when things get weird and Gretchen seeks help, Luis must choose between his children, which only creates a further divide no matter which child he leans toward.
Aiding with the sense of isolation and loneliness, Gretchen is essentially a stranger in a strange land, the only things resembling a support system being her father and König, having just been pulled from her home and away from the life she knew with her mother. Though several of the characters speak English, most are bilingual, speaking either German or French, creating a linguistic form of seclusion for Gretchen. Rather than feeling a sense of relief or relaxation staying at a resort in the beautiful German Alps, Gretchen is, instead, on greater guard. We, the audience, know something is amiss quite early on (and not just because we’ve willingly signed on to watch a horror film), as one of the most distressing shots early on involves a strange noise in the woods during daylight, Grethen looking mildly irritated as she glances in the direction, only for the camera to take on a POV into the woods that suddenly focuses on something that we cannot see. It sends a chill down the spine because the camera sees something, or thinks it does, yet we cannot make it out. If the shift is Gretchen’s, that part is unclear but possible, thereby setting into motion her own growing concern of things not being quite right, escalating her already existing unease before any true danger has appeared toward her. Another great moment, a chilling sequence created via staging and edits (hinted at in the first trailer at the bottom of this review), is the audience’s first real evidence of the truth of Singer’s vision, setting up Gretchen to be a heroine who knows her truth despite all denials that come from those around her. This is the greatest strength of Singer’s work because it never tries to make us doubt ourselves, even as elements are introduced that would cloud our perception; rather, it shows us how entirely twisted the world is without abandoning its protagonist.
Hunter Schafer as Gretchen in CUCKOO Photo Credit: Felix Dickinson, Photo Courtesy of NEON.
Though the mystery is different than audiences expect, Singer is laser-focused on his intention to tell a story in which the key element is the outsider. Whether that outsider is supported or viewed as a figurative infection comes down to how the others feel about it. In a horror tale, singling someone out is as much about finding a target as it is surviving an assault, so even when Singer introduces frequent collaborator Jan Bluthardt (Luz; The Events at Mr. Yamamoto’s Alpine Residence) as a potential rival for Stevens’s (Apostle; Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire) is-he-a-menace König, one doesn’t really know who to trust. The pieces all fit together and Singer doesn’t rush a thing, enabling the audience to get their supernatural fill amid a narrative that’s more about familial relations and the dangers of familial distrust. More than that, unlike some storytellers whose negative spaces look or sound great in the midst of experiencing the singular story but very little holds up under scrutiny, Singer crafts a world that’s disquieting in its total believability.
Jan Bluthardt as Henry in CUCKOO Photo Credit: Felix Dickinson, Photo Courtesy of NEON.
Cuckoo is the kind of follow-up that demonstrates the initial outing wasn’t a fluke, but the start for a filmmaker with something to say. Where Luz is vague, existing within the playspace of possession stories, Cuckoo is entirely clear, so much so that what makes it unsettling is how blasé and non-theatrical Singer introduces and explains the truth. The calm, the clarity, the quiet makes the whole of Cuckoo something that sneaks up on you so that you don’t realize quite how chilling Gretchen’s story is until it’s over.
Screening during Fantasia International Film Festival 2024.
In theaters August 9th, 2024.
For more information, head either to the official Cuckoo Fantasia International Film Festival 2024 webpage or theatrical release webpage.
Final Score: 4 out of 5.
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Categories: In Theaters, Reviews
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