Berlinale 2024: Cuckoo
NEONA girl is bicycling back home. It is 10pm. Everyone has told her not to be outside by herself. She does not care. Listening to music through headphones, she stares at the pavement running by. Streetlamps sporadically light the road, casting her lone shadow. Only, suddenly, another shadow appears. First a silhouette, then a hand. The girl turns, and who (or what) she sees horrifies her.
This is one of many standout sequences in Cuckoo, the sophomore film by German director Tilman Singer. His debut, Luz, was a loving homage to Eurohorror classics of the 1980s, and Cuckoo feels like an evolution of it. Defying genre conventions and labels, going from vampiric horror to action thrills and shootouts, Singer creates an undefinable film that is very reminiscent of Dario Argento’s Phenomena.
A direct point of reference is the setting: Cuckoo takes in the secluded German Alps, a vast area that feels claustrophobic and oppressive, with no room to escape. Hunter Schafer plays Gretchen, who moves in with her father’s new family in Germany after the loss of her mother. Alone and barely speaking the local language, she is convinced by the seductive Herr König (Dan Stevens in another memorable villainous turn) to work at his resort, where strange things are happening at night.
Like the best genre films of the ‘80s, Cuckoo is a set-piece machine, as Singer takes great joy in putting the brilliant Schafer into increasingly more dangerous situations, constantly revealing more and more about how this deranged, isolated world works. Many instances of humor create a purposeful tonal whiplash that is seldom seen in American films, like when König says something ominous through his charming smile, and Gretchen is the only one to point out how creepy he is, which all adds up to create a fun vibe that shows that both cast and crew were in on the absurdity of the scenario.
Similarly to those older classics, it is also refreshing that the Neon-produced Cuckoo is not explicitly “about something”, unlike A24 horror productions that often trade scares for clear-cut themes. Without getting into spoilers, Cuckoo works as a piece on women’s role in society, their autonomy stripped away by men to turn them into breeding machines. Even if its heart is in the right place, Singer’s script is incredibly messy, from characters that vanish into thin air (he jokingly acknowledged at a Q&A post-premiere that, yes, the dog introduced in the opening never coming back was a mistake) to giant gaps in character actions that are hard to justify even with dream logic. Plus, the surprisingly stacked cast feels wasted outside of Schafer, Stevens, and young Mila Lieu, with Jessica Henwick and Astrid Bergès-Frisbey especially getting very little screentime.
Cuckoo is a nightmarish, unpredictable, and confounding experience that is deeply welcome at a time when genre films seem ashamed to embrace pulpier, schlockier tendencies. With instantly memorable iconography (the main creature’s sounds and looks are spine-chilling when they first appear), plenty of laughs (intentional and not), and outstanding set-pieces (a sequence with Loretta Goggi’s “Il mio prossimo amore” was particularly inspired), Cuckoo is bound to be a divisive film among genre fans, likely to turn it into a popular watch at midnight parties.