Cuckoo is a horror movie with a kind of nutso premise that would have been served better by either being a little more conventional or by going a whole lot harder into the nuttiness, which would have been my preference.
17-year-old Gretchen arrives in the Bavarian Alps with her father, stepmother, and her eight-year-old stepsister. The sister can’t talk for some unknown reason, which annoys Gretchen, although a lot seems to annoy her, largely because she’s 17, but also because she has some difficult things she’s dealing with that are coloring her worldview. Her father and stepmother are designing a resort for a German biotech mogul, played with a slyly knowing unctuousness by Dan Stevens, who is not German. Everyone around just acts sort of weird, so we know something’s up, although frankly even the people who turn out to be basically normal act pretty weird, so some of this is not actually in service of the story.
The movie’s writer and director, Tilman Singer, keeps us feeling uneasy with fractured editing, repeated actions, and a discomfiting sound design. In fact, some of that might be a little too successful, because at some point it gets to be a little off-putting in a way that can’t be intentional. The big problem, though, is that it seems like Singer thinks he’s telling us a more coherent story than he actually is—in broad strokes, we can put it all together, and what’s happening reminded me a bit of one of those goofy-but-fun mad scientist stories from the 1930s or ‘40s dressed up with a modern horror style. But at any particular moment it gets to be a little hard to tell why exactly Singer is showing us what he’s showing us, and why certain characters even need to exist in the first place. There are flashes of a movie that wants to push harder into the campiness, with a few bursts of real absurdity and Stevens’ wholly unnecessary German accent, but instead Cuckoo just occupies some middle ground between convention and outright wackiness, and because of that it never really takes flight.
Cuckoo is in theaters August 9th.
