‘Cuckoo’ Review – Hunter Schafer And Dan Stevens Run Wild In Tilman Singer’s Unnecessarily Convoluted Thriller

Even if the title of Tilman Singer’s second feature, Cuckoo, wasn’t an overt reference to the squawks one can hear its birdlike-yet-human monsters making throughout the film, as they haunt the psyches of their fully human prey, it would still make perfect sense for the movie in question. For starters, the beaked foes within have a similar reproductive motive to that of the Eurasian cuckoo, a species of bird that falls under the “brood parasitic” umbrella – they lay their eggs in the nests of other birds and rely on the hosts to raise their young, so they can conserve their energy. Beyond that ornithological definition, there is the phrase “a cuckoo in the nest,” which describes “an unwelcome intruder in a place or situation.” Who those intruders are in Cuckoo is something of an interpretive dance, though if you side with anyone but Hunter Schafer’s Gretchen, you and the maniacal, bespectacled Herr König (Dan Stevens) will enjoy one another’s company in your special corner of Hell.

Really, all that Singer is willing to spell out can be found in a cursory Google search for Neon’s next horror hopeful: Schafer plays our 17-year-old heroine, a tortured young gal who must suffer through a forced relocation at the hands of her detached father, Luis (Marton Csokas), who moves Gretchen, her stepmother Beth (Jessica Henwick), and her stepsister Alma (Mila Lieu) to the Bavarian Alps after the death of Gretchen’s mother. Both architects, Luis and Beth have been hired to help König – no first name, just “Herr,” or “Mister” – design his next tourist trap, giving them one reason to go where cell reception runs low; it’s also clear that Luis is well-off, so perhaps he’s already made more money than he knows what to do with and covets an escape to the erstwhile Führer’s favorite German highlands. 

Either way, Luis and König seem to have a history that makes moving into the latter’s existing mountainside resort an easy getaway from the many problems America has to offer. König offers Gretchen a part-time position as a receptionist in the hotel’s lobby-slash-gift-shop, where women staying in the bridal suite tend to wander in a possessed stupor as the clock creeps towards striking 10 p.m. They puke a lot and disappear once the bile is purged. Terror ensues; Gretchen and co. must survive and escape. 

From what, you ask? Well, the cuckoo people, and Stevens pitch-perfect mustache, of course. But the “why” of it all seems to be the least of Singer’s concerns, at least until a jumbled slew of third-act revelations that are as scrambled as the brains of those being subject to the cuckoo’s screeches are offered more of a misguided respite than as a payoff. Motivation need not be served on a silver platter for a film to be successful – especially in a horror movie that doubles as a quasi-mystery, where the time-tested truth tends to be “the less I know, the better” – but when the best a critic can jot in his notes is “SO confusing what is happening,” some semblance of explanation might not hurt.

And though Cuckoo’s ultimate clarification does eventually come along, it’s the cinematic equivalent to when your Pictionary teammate insists they must finish their drawing despite the fact that the other team already won the point. You know, just so you can see what they were going for. You can see Singer’s best-scribbled effort in the final sketch – his “monsters” are a sort of inverse of the aliens from A Quiet Place in that their sound pierces your eardrums, only you can’t hear it; they also aren’t out to kill everyone, only those that threaten their ultimate mission. But it erases its many, many clues so often that, though you’ve received endless hints at its intention, you’re refused the opportunity to piece anything together long enough to maintain interest.

It’s curious that both of Neon’s scary-ish summer offerings – Oz Perkins’ Longlegs serves as the other, though Cuckoo shouldn’t compete with its studio’s predecessor in terms of box office draw – contain good-not-great performances from their terrified leading ladies and hair-brained, frightening fellas, similarly come undone down the stretch. Longlegs’ ending is nothing short of a tired exposition dump, a white flag that says the film did all it could to make things more interesting and intricate, yet what was sitting right in front of us was, indeed, the obvious truth all along. Cuckoo is a bit more complicated in its conceit and subsequent conclusion due to the simple fact it attempts to make sense out of the nonsensical. There’s something to be said for a film and filmmaker embracing how little logic matters in their story – “Don’t try to understand it. Feel it,” et al. – but when one goes out of their way to decipher the inexplicable in their own script, the experience loses its luster entirely.

Which is a shame, given how much of Cuckoo works, nevermind whether or not it makes any sense. Both Schafer and Stevens turn in near-stellar work as mouse and cat, respectively, and though König has a slight advantage for a time given that he designed the mousetrap himself, the closing showdown between the two is the lone part of the film’s coda that truly works. Stevens, in particular, has seemingly dedicated this portion of his filmography to playing the personification of deranged and quirky; his work on a mind-controlling recorder would make any elementary school music teacher retire on the spot. One particular sequence, which unfortunately features prominently in the film’s official trailer, sees König tell Gretchen that she’s “here because [her] family belongs here.” In response, she violently gestures toward him while gawking at her father, exclaiming, “That’s a fucking weird way to put it!” Then again, Cuckoo has a weird way of putting everything. It might just do so convincingly if it wasn’t so hasty in showing its hand. As this notepad says, “Go off, I guess?”

Cuckoo will debut in theaters on August 9, 2024, courtesy of NEON.