You’d better get used to the discordant screeching soundtrack to Cuckoo (2024), because it starts early and man, it keeps on going. It accompanies the opening scenes, where we witness a young woman fleeing both a family fight and, it seems, the weird noise in her head which quickly afflicts us, too. As she runs into the night, her disappearance is discussed on the telephone: apparently, the loss of this ‘adolescent’ is bad news (well, yeah) as this will make it tougher to keep the ‘mother’ around, but happily, more adolescents will follow. That’s encouraging, then. It’s fairly heavily signposted that Gretchen (Hunter Schafer) might just be one of the adolescents in question. Gretchen has just arrived at an Alpine resort, a little ahead of her father and his new family. They’re regular visitors, it seems, but this time they have come to the resort to live permanently while dad Luis works on building an extension, and Gretchen – newly arrived from the States – will be living with them. Already, everything feels ‘off’ and oddball. How so? Something about the aesthetics perhaps, or the décor, the macros, the characters – everything here is reaching for Lynchian, but perhaps landing at Osgood Perkins, which makes a lot of sense in this, the hallowed year of Longlegs (2024). Perhaps Perkinsian will one day be a thing.
In amongst all of this, we have a young woman who misses home and struggles to adjust, despite being offered a fairly cushy job by resort owner Herr König (Dan Stevens) to help her settle. It’s a quiet role, if (whilst I’m no expert in running an Alpine resort) it seems unusually beset with vomiting women. Perhaps it’s the altitude. Elsewhere, Gretchen tries to get used to living with her dad’s new wife and daughter, which is made more difficult by the fact that little Alma (Mila Lieu) is non-verbal. Trickier still, Alma’s also apparently affected by the mysterious shrieking noise which troubled the runaway girl at the start of the film. Clearly this little sanctuary in the mountains is not all it seems; even Herr König wants the whole resort locked down by 10pm every night, and distinctly forbids Gretchen from cycling home at the end of her shift, which of course she does anyway. Still, this grants us one of the standout creepy scenes in the entire film, so she was right to do it. A maniacal woman gives chase; as Gretchen starts the committed process of collecting head injuries, it seems no one wants to believe that she got these, directly or indirectly, because of the mystery woman. No one, that is, except for a down-at-heel detective who wants Gretchen’s help to crack a case, once and for all.
There’s very little objective normality here, but even that is only offered up as something to deliberately unspool, particularly when the film begins to toy around with linear time – zipping back and forth by just a few seconds, but making it clear that rules are not respected in this universe. The strong impression is that, if you told director/writer Tilman Singer that his film was bizarre, he’d say, ‘thanks’. It’s very much of that school where everything looks a bit 80s, and all the tech is analogue with the exception of a modern, slimline mobile phone to break the spell (and, oh, a plug on a tape player sent from America with a big CE mark on it). Aside from that, the abundant wood panelling, the furniture, the lighting, even the very brown wardrobe choices – all look very 80s. People didn’t, or don’t always wear bright colours – this film abundantly makes that point. Even the film’s use of code-switching contributes to the film’s ingrained oddness, with German, French and English being used in succession in ways which don’t always make a lot of sense, given who is speaking to whom. Add to this that we’re on the Italian border and have characters using ASL, and it’s a very pan-European, pan-linguistic horror film. That all adds to the film’s layering.
Yet for all that, when stripped down to its basic elements, Cuckoo‘s tale is in many respects a tale as old as time: an unfamiliar place, a remote community with its own schemes, ideas and rules, and a bunch of unwitting outsiders who get trapped there. Add in the idea of remote or absent parents, and a young woman trying to navigate early adulthood bereft of support and love, and voila – this could be any number of horrors. It goes quite heavy on the whole ‘nest’, ‘cuckoo’, ‘nesting instinct’ ideas too, but actually this all leads to a rather unsatisfying final act, and the theme of parenting doesn’t really hold up. If you love a peculiar, if carefully curated atmosphere and can suspend both your disbelief and your need for narrative closure, then it’s possible, or even likely that you’ll love Cuckoo. For this reviewer – and please skip the rest of this sentence, if you want to avoid a very minor spoiler – I couldn’t quite get past the unbelievable amounts of faff taking place, purely to wind up with some offspring. Similar faff in Rosemary’s Baby, as a counterexample, makes sense, because they were literally trying to birth Satan’s child and quite clearly needed to do that in secret. I have no idea why or how the net gain of one or two screeching children in the Alps was worth the clear effort and secrecy it took, or what you could do with them once procured. Does humanity need a tiny number of screeching, fitting children for some unknown reason? Do they need ‘conservation’? Are these better somehow? I have no idea.
That aside, the film does a great deal to craft sensory overload and atmospherics, making particularly good use of soundscape, and could be enjoyed as a purely immersive experience, even if the plot dwindles away to something rather meagre. Despite feeling a little personally underwhelmed by the end of the film’s 100 minutes, I still enjoyed this experience more than Cuckoo’s NEON cousin, Longlegs, which chronically underdelivered; Cuckoo has issues, sure, but more charm overall, and kudos to Hunter Schafer for doing nearly the whole thing with a massive bandage on her head, Basil Fawlty style; it’s nice when glamour goes out of the window for a bit.
Cuckoo (2024) is available on VOD now.