It's obvious from the moment that teenager Gretchen (Euphoria's Hunter Schafer) and her family meet her father's new boss, the alarmingly chipper German resort owner Herr König (Dan Stevens), that something is deeply wrong with this man. Gretchen's father Luis (Marton Csokas) and her stepmother Beth (Jessica Henwick) seem completely oblivious to König's sinister intentions, and even the skeptical Gretchen proves remarkably trusting at the wrong moments when König offers his help. But there's always a certain menace hiding behind his eyes.
Writer/director Tilman Singer's Cuckoo is the kind of horror movie that relies on its characters making frequently ill-advised decisions, blithely walking into situations that the audience easily recognizes as dangerous, because they don't expect anything horrific to be happening at the quaint, remote vacation village that König runs in the Bavarian Alps. It's about as quaint as The Shining's Overlook Hotel, though, and it's eerily underpopulated during the summer season. The ostensible reason that König has hired Luis and Beth and put them up in a lavish house near the resort is left purposely vague, and of course it's not his actual motive for luring the family to this isolated location.
König offers Gretchen a part-time job at the resort's reception desk, where she encounters even more odd personalities, including guests who seem to be in trance-like states. Late one night as she's riding her bike home from work, she's attacked by a strange woman who emits high-pitched screeches and disappears by the time help arrives. Local police and doctors ignore Gretchen's concerns, and Luis and Beth are far more focused on Gretchen's mute young half-sister Alma (Mila Lieu), who starts experiencing unexplained seizures.
It takes quite a while for Cuckoo to reveal what's really going on at the resort, and there are still plenty of unanswered questions by the end of the movie. The truth about the screeching woman and König's diabolical plan is deeply silly, but Singer largely plays things straight, and he makes the movie's ridiculous ideas into something unsettling and nightmarish. Stevens channels the disturbing intensity he brought to his role in cult horror movie The Guest with the playfulness of his offbeat characters in this year's Abigail and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. He's always fun to watch here, even — or especially — when König is behaving completely inexplicably.
Schafer brings more layers to her role as the now-familiar horror protagonist who's processing past trauma, in this case the recent death of her mother. Before anything scary even happens, Gretchen wants nothing more than to leave the resort and return to the U.S., and she copes with her grief by calling her old answering machine to hear her mother's voice. She describes Alma to a co-worker as "my father's daughter," which is surefire foreshadowing that her eventual confrontation with evil will require her to embrace the family relationship she's been rejecting.
That theme of familial reconciliation doesn't carry as much emotional power as it could, since Luis, Beth and Alma get minimal character development. Luis is a distant, dismissive father, and Beth barely acknowledges Gretchen's existence. There's no sense of their background together or the history between Luis and Gretchen's mother. Csokas and Henwick are both talented actors given very little to do here, and their characters get completely sidelined during the movie's climax.
As the mute Alma, Lieu doesn't go overboard with the standard horror-movie creepy-kid vibes, instead finding the genuine fear and confusion of a child who's caught up in forces she can't control or understand. Still, Cuckoo is all about the showdown between Gretchen and König, and it's best when Schafer and Stevens spar with each other. Their final battle is suitably brutal, once the stakes are belatedly made clear.
The immersive, unnerving sound design and visual style make up for some of the narrative shortcomings, and the monsters lurking at the resort are often terrifying to behold even if the details about their existence don't make much sense. That holds true for Cuckoo as well, which loses momentum the more that König divulges about his mission and the part that Gretchen's family is meant to play in it. When Gretchen is faced with horrors beyond her comprehension, she's startled and disoriented, and the audience is, too. As she learns what she's up against, that initial sense of dread wears off, and while the threat is still looming, its intriguing, disquieting mystique is gone.
Cuckoo
