If I had a nickel for every time a blonde actress from HBO's Euphoria appeared as the lead in a horror film in 2024, I would have two nickels — which isn't a lot, but it's cool that it happened twice.
Tilman Singer returns with his second feature film, Cuckoo, which follows Hunter Schafer as Gretchen, a moody, reluctant 17-year-old forced to relocate from the US to a resort in the German Alps with her father Luis (Marton Csokas), his wife Beth (Jessica Henwick) and mute young daughter Alma (Mila Lieu).
Mr. König (Dan Stevens rocking a fantastic German accent), the uncanny resort owner and friend and employer of Gretchen's parents, greets the family upon their arrival and, as the family members attempt to settle into their newfound life, Gretchen quickly begins to feel the suffocating effects of this strange place and the strange people that come with it.
Cuckoo pulls from myriad horror genres as Singer dips his brush into body horror, supernatural mystery and psychological thriller to paint a complex picture. It's easy to draw comparisons to films like It Follows or Barbarian, but Cuckoo shatters those assumptions and throws the audience for a loop — quite literally. This melting pot proves to be a bit too demanding and overly ambitious at times, as Singer, both the director and writer, attempts to blend these different genres together into a tight and cohesive story that threatens to boil over at times.
Famous for her role as Jules Vaughn in Euphoria, and more recently as Tigris in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, Schafer is endlessly engaging in her first starring role in a feature film. The familial dysfunction between Gretchen and her father's family provides insight to Gretchen's behaviour that Schafer embodies expertly. Luis and Beth are so single-sighted with Alma and her mysterious seizures — which begin after they arrive at the resort — that they attribute anything that happens to Gretchen as teenage rebellion, whether it's her moodiness, her attempt to run away with a stranger she met in the resort lobby, or when she's attacked on a bike ride home and hospitalized.
As a result of this fraught familial dynamic, Gretchen clashes with her father and is scornful of the silent Alma in a way that feels unnecessarily cruel, but makes for a hair-raising reconciliation between the two sisters at the climax of the film. Because Schafer is such a likeable actress, despite the character's rougher edges, we can easily empathize with and understand Gretchen's angst.
The world that Cuckoo establishes in the first act slowly begins to unravel after the midway point of the film, as Gretchen is sucked into a world of reproductive high-jacking cuckoo-bird style, and motivations become muddled. Bad-guy monologues teeter toward the cartoonish, contradicting the seriousness of these scenes. However, the stylish flair of the actors and director still makes Cuckoo a highly captivating watch, with a twisted narrative that offers some good jump scares, compelling action sequences and one zany Dan Stevens.
Singer's unique directorial style complements the warped nature of the film. Shot on 35 mm, Singer collaborated with director of photography Paul Faltz, who had previously worked with Singer on his 2018 feature film debut, Luz. The use of interesting visual and auditory motifs throughout the film captivates the senses.
Despite its tendency to fall into incoherency in the second half, Cuckoo isn't completely birdbrained. Singer weaves together an interesting and intricate horror, sci-fi tapestry complemented by a nuanced performance from Hunter Schafer.