Cuckoo: Great Cast Elevates Wobbly Thriller That’s Kind of Good and Kind of Not
By Chris Knight
Rating: C+
If he wanted to, British actor Dan Stevens could make a decent living as a costume-drama character actor.
He had a small role in 2008’s Sense & Sensibility miniseries, a recurring part in Downton Abbey, and he played Charles Dickens in The Man Who Invented Christmas. He has the bearing and the voice. (To wit, he was Princes Charles AND Philip in a recent animated series.)
Thankfully, he likes to mix it up. Take his fantastic turn as a grieving soldier (or is he?) in 2014’s The Guest, and a fun bit where he played an android in the 2021 German rom-com I’m Your Man, and where his flawless German, delivered with a trace of a British accent, made him a convincing almost-human.
In Tilman Singer’s Cuckoo, he’s Herr König (no first names please, he’s German), the mildly creepy proprietor of a remote resort in the Bavarian Alps. Luis (Marton Csokas) is moving there with his new wife (Jessica Henwick), their daughter Alma (Mila Lieu), and Gretchen, the 17-year-old daughter of his previous marriage. Guess which one of them is not thrilled to be there?
Gretchen is played by an American actress with the badass name of Hunter Schafer. (“Hunter Shepherd” in German.) Her character lives up to that billing, alternately protective and vengeful, scared and resourceful. She and Stevens make an appealing pair of antagonists.
It’s not clear at first what exactly is rotten in the state of Bavaria, but I will say that the title Cuckoo, a reference to nature’s most famous brood parasite, is ignored at your peril. (It’s so much clearer than Vivarium, a similarly themed 2020 Jesse Eisenberg film.) Gretchen gets a job at the front desk of Herr König’s hotel, where she notices that the clientele seems a little off, with a habit of vomiting without warning.
She’s trying to save enough money to return to her mom in America, but is pulled away from her plan, first by her half-sister’s unexplained seizures, then by a mysterious, red-eyed woman, hellbent on killing her.
It all spirals into a deliciously bizarre psychological thriller, especially when Gretchen is approached by a rogue cop (Jan Bluthardt) who may not even be a cop, but who is the only one to believe in her weird assailant.
Tilman, whose previous film, 2018’s Luz, also involved a strong female protagonist, a demonic aggressor, and Bluthardt, throws a lot into this one, with the result that not everything or everyone gets the attention deserved. Characters have a habit of disappearing when not required, only to pop up again at opportune moments. Thankfully, Schafer is on screen almost constantly, but it does sometimes feel like the movie doesn’t know what to do with all its other pieces.
I was ultimately less enthralled with the final film than I was with some of the performances in Cuckoo. Stevens and Schafer are amazing, and Bluthardt makes an excellent oddity, a convenient ally with his own mysterious agenda. But Cuckoo can’t quite bring all its disparate elements together into something cohesive and coherent.
It also commits the horror-movie sin of confusing volume with intensity. Many’s the scene where the filmmakers crank the soundtrack to 11 when what’s needed is a little aural creativity. It’s not a make-or-break choice in and of itself, but Cuckoo needs all the help it can get, stellar cast notwithstanding.
Cuckoo. Directed by Tilman Singer. Starring Hunter Schafer and Dan Stevens. In theatres August 9.