Just weeks after NEON delivered one of the better horror movies of the year with Longlegs, the same distributor is back with Cuckoo, including preview showings in 35mm in some cities. Cuckoo, the latest film by German director Tilman Singer (best known for Luz a couple of years ago), isn’t as successful as Longlegs. There are some creative stylistic elements and a magnetic lead performance from Euphoria star Hunter Schafer. But while the film sets up some intriguing mysteries, it holds off too long on delivering explanations, and they’re so inscrutable that they’re ultimately meaningless.
Schafer plays Gretchen, a young American teenager who, following the sudden death of her mother, has moved to the mountains of Germany with her father (Marton Csokas) and his new family, including her stepmother (Jessica Henwick) and her younger half-sister Alma (Mila Lieu). Her dad seems unusually beholden to his boss (Dan Stevens), a man known as Herr König, who’s setting up a new resort in rural Germany but appears up to even more nefarious things than that. The plot of a boss controlling his long-suffering employee was better executed a couple of months ago in one of the segments of Yorgos Lanthimos’ Kinds of Kindness, a movie in which Schafer had a brief but memorable cameo.
Gretchen goes to work at a hotel front desk. Soon, she stumbles into a series of strange happenings, from young women vomiting for no reason to multiple characters having seizures to a ghost-like figure who menaces her at night. Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey shows up briefly as a love interest.
The title has a double meaning, including some business involving cuckoo birds, which ends up tied into the main plot in an underwhelming manner. The look and feel of Cuckoo are impressive, but the film keeps getting tripped up by its plot before collapsing into nonsense. It all leads up to some revelations about what’s going on, which at the same time are mostly unsatisfying and nonsensical. I guess it’s a successful choice that the plot concerns Germans engaging in creepy genetic experiments without giving the people responsible any Nazi coding.
Uneven as Euphoria is, it seems like everyone in the cast has become a movie star in the last couple of years—including Sydney Sweeney, Zendaya, and Jacob Elordi—and now it’s Schafer’s turn. She’s impressive, especially as someone who suffers more bodily harm the longer the movie goes on. She’ll be in better movies than this. Stevens is convincingly creepy here. But what’s less convincing is the script, which can’t begin to prop up the premise.