‘I really want to come home…’
There is a fine line between surrealist cinema that evokes extreme emotion and bewildering nonsense that is strange for the sake of it. Tilman Singer’s Cuckoo straddles that line resulting in an uneven film with moments of greatness…
Following the death of her mother, grieving teenager Gretchen (Hunter Schafer) is dragged along to a resort town in the Bavarian Alps by her father (Marton Csokas) and his new family (consisting of his wife Beth and their mute daughter Alma (Mila Lieu)). Upon arrival, they are greeted by eccentric hotel owner Herr Konig (Dan Stevens) and things soon turn a nightmarish turn as vomiting women keep showing up in the hotel lobby.
Cuckoo takes the time loops from the work of Moorhead and Benson and combines them with the surrealist paranoia of David Lynch and the insidious body horror of David Cronenberg. In truth, however, the film is never quite as great as the sum of its parts. It’s visually arresting, well-acted and features some truly terrifying sound design, but all of the good stuff often gets lost in the overly convoluted plot and deliberately obtuse pacing (the time loop elements serve simply to drag the story down).
While Cuckoo proves beyond doubt that Schafer is capable of carrying a film on her own, this is also a movie that flatters to deceive. All the elements for a horror classic are here, and Singer is successful at producing an atmosphere of ominous dread, but there is a nagging feeling that this kind of thing has been done before and done better – perhaps a film that would benefit from repeated viewings.
