Cuckoo harkens back to a simpler time for horror movies, a time when villains would laugh maniacally, when blood looked suspiciously like tomato sauce and when Mum and Dad were a total drag. Gone is any pretence of offering viewers a taut exploration of intergenerational trauma or a similarly high-brow theme, instead providing a campness that was lost somewhere in the mid-2010s. If you’re looking for scares you can certainly do better, but what’s here is committed its own weirdness in a way that can only be described as admirable.
Writer/Director Tilman Singer wastes no time establishing the atmosphere, which is perhaps the film’s best achievement at horror. Singer and Cinematographer Paul Faltz play with the environment to great effect, obscuring our view or focusing a bit too long on something ordinary. It all results in the seemingly idyllic resort nestled at the foot of the German Alps being instilled with a sense of being overexposed, threatening something malicious lurking just beyond the tree line.
That tension is lost once that thing is revealed, the anxiety petering out once the perpetrator of everyone’s torment is shown to be a generically monster-fied lookalike of someone you might sit next to on the bus, floral dress and all. This would be fine if the film committed to its campness, but it’s instead half in, half out. Everyone talks about the ‘Homo-Cuculidae’ as something primal and evil, but it seems more interested in giving its victims a rash than anything more malicious. Singer flirts with body horror with some uncomfortable close ups and everyone finding themselves receiving a swath of injuries by the film’s end. But none of that is anything to make you nauseas or cover your eyes unless you’re particularly squeamish.
That inconsistency can also be seen in Hunter Schafer’s Gretchen, beginning as a typical 17 year old, huffing and puffing at every turn, but somewhere transforming into a likeable, charismatic lead that wouldn’t feel out of place in the golden age of teenage horror heroines during the 80-90s. This is more due to Schafer’s skill as a performer, and not the writing quality of the character, who flip flops between pleading to not be left alone and waiting “for the action to start” without anything in-between you would call a character beat.
The uncertainty of the film rears its head again with Herr König, played with enough depth by Dan Stevens to work at both horror and comedy, though not avoiding the Herr Doktor trope. They’re weird and very obviously up to something, and the film is at its funniest when toying with the obviousness of it. The issue is the character is played for laughs so often that when it comes time to fear them it hasn’t been earned. The rest of the cast is similarly well-performed, if insubstantial, with a pair of major supporting characters disappearing at the beginning of the third act to little acknowledgement. You get the sense that everyone was having fun here.
It all feels a bit unsure of itself, uncertain of whether it wants to scare you or make you laugh. It does a decent enough job at both but never really establishes a reliability in either genre, instead haphazardly juggling the two. To be clear, this is a fun movie. If you’re looking for an excuse for a night out or find yourself home alone and want to take advantage of that, you can do much worse than Cuckoo. But avid fans of horror should be sure to check their expectations before committing.
by Jack Taite
Cuckoo
Sydney Film Festival