CUCKOO - Mark Reviews Movies

Cuckoo, Neon

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 8, 2024

In the Bavarian Alps of Germany, there's a quiet and seemingly pleasant resort that feels like hell for Gretchen (Hunter Schafer), who has been brought to the place by her father and his second wife. It keeps getting worse for the protagonist of Cuckoo in ways that go beyond the shaky family dynamic and don't quite add up to much more than a descent into horror-based weirdness for its own sake.

Writer/director Tilman Singer comes up with some neat ideas, including a central conceit that's more sinister than the filmmaker allows it to be, in his sophomore feature. If the story and characters feel secondary to the assorted tricks and gimmicks, at least the gamesmanship on display makes for some inventive sequences of mounting tension.

The basics of the narrative, which are really all that Singer allows for in this plot, have Gretchen arriving at the remote resort in the mountains with her father Luis (Márton Csókás), his wife Beth (Jessica Henwick), and their daughter, a half-sister Gretchen won't acknowledge as a sibling, Alma (Mila Lieu). Architects Luis and Beth are there to design a second resort nearby, and after the death of Gretchen's mother, Luis has decided that the 17-year-old can't and shouldn't be living on her own.

Everything seems normal enough. The resort's owner König (Dan Stevens, showing off his command of the German language and an appropriate accent) is polite to and accommodating toward the family, even offering Gretchen a job and a nice salary at the check-in office while she's living there. With nothing to do but sit and stew in grief and misery, the teen takes the offer and quickly realizes there's a lot of strange things happening at the resort.

Some of those include guests suddenly vomiting in the office, the loud sounds of birds chirping in the night when they should probably be sleeping, and König's insistence that the front desk be shut down by 10 o'clock every night. Letting a co-worker leave early, Gretchen learns that rule the hard way, as a frantic König calls and keeps calling her to get out, lock the doors, and return to her room as quickly as possible. Gretchen's not the type to take orders from anyone, so her bike ride back to the hotel becomes an unexpected chase.

What's compelling here is less the general atmosphere of the tale, which feels a bit muted by the amount of exposition in the first act of Singer's script, and more the way particular scenes build in terms of tension and terror. Take the aforementioned chase, which starts as a relaxed ride down a road with plenty of passing streetlights. There's nothing to fear here, despite König' eerie warning, right? Well, Singer uses those lights and, more importantly, the shadows provided by their absence—and, even more vitally, cast by them—to clever effect.

First, the camera just glimpses a figure—unseen and unheard by the rider, who's keeping her eyes ahead and her ears filled with music on big headphones—running across the road behind Gretchen. Then, we get a slightly better view of the mysterious presence off to the side and in the distance, sprinting against the illumination of the lights of one of the resort's bungalows. Finally, the spots of light on the ground show Gretchen's shadow as she passes, only for a second shadow to appear.

Singer's control of such scenes, in terms of how they escalate and are constructed, is certainly impressive, and that one in particular is simply a one-off of brief tension. The recurring motif of suspense comes from the secret at the core of this resort, its visitors, and the people operating behind the scenes to prevent anyone from finding out what's actually happening. Ignoring the specifics (which are eventually explained just enough to only seem mildly silly), the more tangible results involve a loud sound that creates a disorienting effect in the listener. Gretchen experiences it early into her stay, as her room starts shaking (The people within the frame remain in balance, making it quite dizzying at times) and she begins repeating the same actions over and over again.

It's akin to a time-loop, but there's nothing in the realm of that sort of science fiction happening here. The explanation, of course, would give away too much, but the collective force of the sound, visuals, and editing is striking. What adds a layer of tension, though, is as we realize time only seems to stop and repeat for those affected, as Singer occasionally leaves that perspective to watch as a threat moves forward through time—and closer and closer to the character stuck in that loop.

It's far more intriguing to discuss the construction of such individual sequences than the plot itself, which starts to feel like a series of distractions to keep the truth at bay. There's a determined police detective (played by Jan Bluthardt), who brings Gretchen aboard his investigation into the goings-on at the resort, and information comes in bits and pieces from there.

The answer doesn't have much room to breathe in Cuckoo, partly because it arrives so late but also because the resolution amounts to a climactic standoff/shootout. The climax may be competently staged, but surely, a movie that is capable of unique scare mechanics and possesses such a potentially diabolical secret at its center deserves better than that.

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