Hunter Schafer in “Cuckoo.”
Neon
German director Tilman Singer’s Cuckoo comes after several years in which a new, heavily hyped horror film comes out every few months. These films claim to feature a great director or be considered one of the scariest films of all time, but they tend to crumble in the memory upon closer reflection.
Horror is more respectable today than it has ever been—just look at the enthusiastic response to Chris Nash’s extremely gory In a Violent Nature, which would probably have been far more negative 20 years ago—but the fact that it’s almost the only kind of independent film that turns a profit hasn’t done it any good. Issues like trauma, addiction, and mental illness have become cliches, treated with as much seriousness as Jason Voorhees’ murder count. The giallos of ’70s Italy weren’t exactly progressive, especially towards women, but looking back, they show the benefits of working from the subconscious and treating film as a visual medium rather than a delivery tool for subtext.
While “Cuckoo” certainly has its flaws, it is imbued with a playfulness that sets it apart from the competition. It treats the horror film as an arena in which Singer can try out the strangest ideas. Even as it flirts with uncomfortable subject matter — the German villain’s medical experiments clearly seem Nazi-coded, while he also controls women’s pregnancies — it trusts audiences to figure out what we think. (Few films about eugenics try to be fun!) It’s a far cry from the gritty, visually precise direction of Osgood Perkins’ “Longlegs,” released last month by the same distributor to great acclaim.
17-year-old Gretchen (trans actor Hunter Schafer) arrives at a resort in the German Alps with her parents Luis (Marton Csokas) and his wife Beth (Jessica Henwick). She takes a job at the hospital. She is sullen and resentful toward Luis, Beth (who is not her biological mother), and the couple’s much younger daughter, Alma (Mimi Lieu). (She respects the fact that Alma devoured her twin sister in the womb as a fetus.)
As she spends her days working at the front desk of a hotel run by Mr. King (Dan Stevens), she begins to experience some bizarre, terrifying visions. The first occurs while she is relaxing in her room, playing bass guitar and listening to herself on headphones. Time shifts into a disorienting loop, and Alma comes in to attack her. Then she is stalked by a hooded woman as she rides her bike at night. Her life brightens up when she meets and develops a crush on Ed (Astrid Bergés-Frisbey). The two girls fall in love and plan to go to Paris, but a car accident caused by another attack by the hooded woman puts an end to that. Gretchen is badly injured and wears a cast on her arm for the rest of “Cuckoo.” Her suspicions about the hotel are reinforced by strange cases of women spontaneously vomiting.
Although Dan Stevens is fluent in German, he is actually English. (He played a German-speaking android in Maria Schrader’s I’m Your Man, and his command of languages spans the globe.) He draws on the vast arsenal of Teutonic stereotypes with glee. His body language, always a little too overt in the early scenes in the hotel, does not bode well. He sneaks up on Gretchen, mangles her name, and turns a mirror over so he can secretly watch her. He even hangs out outside the hotel, strumming a flute. His performance is the highlight of Cuckoo. It’s no insult to the rest of the cast that it’s the film’s most memorable element. It’s not the first or last time the villain steals the show from the hero.
Singer doesn’t try to piece together his plot until the second half, and “Cuckoo” might be stronger if it were more opaque. Singer gets stuck between his wilder impulses and the potential to reach huge audiences around the world (unlike his debut film, the 2018 German-language “Luz”). Still, “Cuckoo” develops some intriguing ideas: creating a new species of human outside of Homo sapiens, manipulating people through sound. Rather than scaring, it relies on weirdness. It never takes itself seriously enough to be very scary, though it’s not flippant. Hints of a more sober, narrative-driven film — like the subplot involving former cop Henry (Jan Bluthardt) — scatter ashes of the police crime script throughout. They’re distracting: The pleasure of “Cuckoo” isn’t in solving a mystery, just seeing where the film takes us next.
“Cuckoo” | Director: Tilman Singer | neon | Premiere: August 9th
