Cuckoo clocks in at 102 minutes, but it will take at least that long for even the most forgiving horror movie fan to sort it all out after sitting through it.
Once the strenuous audio-visual effects are taken into consideration and filed neatly away, writer-director Tilman Singer’s latest, a follow-up to his 2018 shockeroo, Luz, boils down to a meticulously bizarre troubled-family exercise centered on a 17-year-old girl named Gretchen (American former fashion model Hunter Schafer) and her family’s awful summer vacation in the German up-country. It’s an ordeal for Gretchen, and us.
As their car pulls up in front of the Alpschatten Resort, it’s clear that Gretchen’s father Luis (Márton Csókás) and her stepmother Beth (Jessica Henwick) practice a method of child-rearing light on warm cuddles and heavy on icy dismissiveness. They have no time for Gretchen’s needy adolescent truculence. But distressingly, Luis and Beth also seem fed up with their own younger child, Alma (Mila Lieu), who suffers from epilepsy and hears disturbing, other-worldly sounds.
As this dismal scenario plays out, Luis, Beth and most of the other characters, including the all-important Gretchen, are in the habit of delivering their dialogue in a tone we might expect to hear from a home appliance technician announcing, “Ma’am, your ice-maker water line is blocked.”
Stir in the resort guests’ competing European languages and the odd noises coming from unexpected corners, and Cuckoo takes shape as not only a portrait of irritating, irritated people but a melodramatic obstacle course, with horror-flick shock cuts and non-sequiturs aplenty. No wonder Gretchen wants to jump on her bicycle and get away.
At the resort, owner Herr König (British TV-and-film vet Dan Stevens) might have stepped out of any number of creepy-landlord stories. His stereotypical Teutonic accent and awkward body language naturally raise warning flags for Gretchen. She’s already bent out of shape by her parents, but König’s mad-scientist theories on such subjects as “brood parasites” and “vanishing twin syndrome” only add to the general distress. More than that, he pronounces her name “GREAT-shun,” a perfectly understandable but spooky mannerism when lumped in with the overall queasy-making atmosphere.
The characters hanging around the Alpschatten—translation: Alpine shadow—bring their own individual nuttiness to an already odd situation. Dr. Bonomo (Proschat Madani) interrogates Gretchen with concentration-camp efficiency. Ed, another lost soul (Astrid Bergès-Frisbey), wanders into a scene, utters something incomprehensible, then wanders away. Gretchen’s front-desk companion, Trixie (Greta Fernández), has a complicated private life—a few of her scenes are looped for maximum confusion. Policeman Henry (Jan Bluthart) is in the middle of an investigation of Herr König. And then there’s the local gremlin, a berserk woman in a raincoat whose hobby is popping up out of nowhere and chasing our poor teenager.
Everyone in the cast seemingly conspires to either scare, reject or harm Gretchen. She accumulates bruises, lacerations and bloody scars as the movie goes on, amid incessant shrieks and squeaks coming from the dark forest surroundings. Cuckoo may set a record for on-camera scenes of vomiting.
Gretchen’s nerve-wracking visit to the Alps eventually takes on overtones of Roman Polanski’s psychological horror pic, Repulsion (1965), with Catherine Deneuve going crazy after being left home alone in a Paris flat. The big difference is that here, high in the mountains, Gretchen’s nemesis is other people. She’s haunted every minute by strangers with menacing intentions. No one ever really stops picking on her.
German filmmaker Singer hurls everything he’s got at Gretchen, an endlessly derivative assault of grotesqueries in the service of what is essentially the tale of a custody battle. The violence, physical as well as emotional, grows wearisome. Conscientious horror-flick fans may begin to wonder if this ill-tempered young woman is worth the trouble.
Is Hunter Schafer the new Mia Goth? Anyone attempting to seriously address that question deserves to be sentenced to a weekend at the Alpschatten. Or an hour and a half watching Cuckoo. What a choice.
* * *
In theaters
