Unfortunately, the title “Cuckoo” becomes a little more bewildering each time the account attempts to narrate itself. The further the writer director Tilman Singer advances in explaining the ominous events that propel this surreal disturbing thriller, the weaker the plot becomes.
So merely killing time during the explanation of the hows and whys could be ideal, and this is what the film never helps its audience to recover from. Either there was too much we knew, or those things that we were told were not enough. A little hubris, it would seem, did not possess the author; ambiguity would have been welcomed; more than enough to stay under the spell created by the writer. However, what we are there to witness sometimes is ‘Wow’ and other times it is unexplainable. It is ‘Wait, what?’
Whatever the case may be, the audience is somewhat sold by the strong performances offered, in this case by Hunter Schafer and Dan Stevens, but not for too long. Take note of course that both actors are performing totally different things here and the frictions and their rubs dare us to think perversely and provide comedy from the onset. For roles in the unrelated films “The Guest,” “Abigail,” or “Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga” for example, Stevens is gifted in using his good looks for malicious reasons. And he is perfectly proficient in German just as he was in “I’m Your Man.” He possesses a certain soham again leadership qualities, a slightly off kilter look in his stunningly blue eyes, a homicidal yet alluring stare.
We are pulled into Schaefer’s perspective in a different way. She is our one dimensional filter. Among all the characters and while everyone else seems unconcerned she is convinced that things are quite out of place in the idyllic world of the film and isn’t afraid to express it. However, just like how Florence Pugh had troubles in ‘Midsommar’ because no one cared to listen to her in a beautiful yet dangerous alien country, she experiences the same scenario in this picture.
Schafer plays a 17 year old American girl named Gretchen who recently lost her mother. In a haze of sadness, she relocates with her father (Marton Csokas), his new spouse (Jessica Henwick) and a little mute girl (Mila Lieu) to a hotel in the Bavarian Alps. Singer, together with cinematographer Paul Faltz, establishes this stunning site as a harsh prison, capturing the view from the base of the mountains looking up in order to express Gretchen’s sense of entrapment.
The family’s host, Stevens’ odious Herr König, runs the establishment and has stayed the family because he is working with Gretchen’s father on his next project. But right from the beginning the heavy darkness and cold mirrors seem to tell us that this is not a fun vacation. And with Herr König’s passive aggressive attitude that turns more than aggressive, she’s left with a panic to escape.
The way he says her name makes me laugh: he puts an obnoxious raspy emphasis on the R in Gretchen’s name. However, it is also a sign of his conceited brutality. But there are also strange forces that appear to be preventing her from moving. One especially harrowing scene shows Gretchen pedaling her bicycle home in the dark after wrapping up her reluctantly taken night shift at the front office of the hotel. Singer and editors Terel Gibson and Philipp Thomas deftly sustain our dread by unveiling the amounts of visibility just enough underneath the streetlamps to horrify us. Likewise, there is a mesmeric recurrence of patterns which happens numerous times, each time reaching a bone rattling climax. A cataclysmic quiver and a piercing scream accompany this construct; although this sound technique is startling at the beginning, it later becomes grating, especially when we find out where it comes from.
And yet, since this experience is disconnected from the trauma, we see everything according to her trauma. The haze of her angers’ physical form is both disquieting and sad, and the anklets she leaves behind as messages on the voicemail of her dead mother fail to fulfill any of the resolves the woman anticipates them to provide. Almost every emotion is felt for us by this particular persona, because selfishly we want her to exude her strength for physical exploitation, as her character begins focusing on her inner animal and control her. She also has a unique aloofness when responding to the mounting ridiculousness in her surroundings, which provides some much needed humor in the midst of the tension.
Otherwise, the stakes become clear or so we believe. Deep in this orpool, there is perhaps a savage fable about wives and the right to self determination, but the plot is so fast paced that it cannot be delivered. It is quite possible, however, that you may be repulsed by it as it is very much the case with “Cuckoo”.
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