The brood

CUCKOO

2024

Written and directed by Tilman Singer

Spoilers: moderate

Cuckoo is incredibly pure.  I don't really know if that's an entirely good thing—whether it's what's holding Cuckoo back from greatness, or is one of the reasons it's kind of great anyway—and I'm not entirely sure I've ever been able to settle that fundamental "what are movies for?" question for myself.  But it's refreshing, especially after a long shift in the Best Picture mines of 2025, in which movies hopped up on their own self-important interrogations of what-fucking-ever made me hope for exactly the kind of deliverance Cuckoo offers, and it still surprised me because, well, just look at the damn title.  So, sure, there are, if you prefer, resonances all over the place here in Cuckoo, indeed some pretty interesting ones, but if it is about something, in the way one means when they say a work is, all-caps, "About Something," I confess I don't know what that thing would be, and even for horror, maybe especially for horror, that is kind of nuts.  I don't know, maybe it actually is a massively allegorical work where every single thing about its wacky B-movie plot has intense meaning, if you spent long enough deciphering it, but let us consider one of Cuckoo's most saliently non-salient aspects, even though I sort of don't want to—I would like to follow the movie's example—except it illustrates what I mean so well, and it also seems silly, at the level of commentary, to ignore it.  Anyway, it's a movie so thoroughly resistant of the idea that it needs to make itself "about something" to its audience that while its lead actress, Hunter Schafer, is trans, this is entirely immaterial, which would be a little surprising in any context, and certainly moreso in a movie where the plot revolves around uteruses.  There is a (tasteful, subtle, and also rather funny) gag that gestures, as vaguely as anything, at the possibility of a biological distinction for its heroine, though I don't think this gesture confirms whether Schafer's character is cis or trans.  Or maybe an equally pointed way of describing Cuckoo is that it's a movie, 103 minutes long and maybe a touch short, that does not perceive the need to make an argument that the usurpation of the reproductive capacity of others is "bad," taking that as pretty self-evident, so it shall therefore move immediately to the business of prosecuting a skillfully-made creature-feature about a rather novel movie monster, with a little conspiracism laid atop.  God, it's fun.

It's a pretty good representative for a position I've taken on and off over the years, which does sometimes sound slightly spurious even to myself, that the best thing a movie can be about is itself.  And besides "genre," broadly-defined, maybe that's as much of a connection within the filmography of its maker, writer-director Tilman Singer, as I'm going to get, since you could accuse his first and to-date only other picture, Luz, of being the failure mode of a movie being "about itself," though this would be unfair since characters and plot (and production design and not being boring) are part of the "itself" I'd be referring to.  Cuckoo's a nice reminder, in an immediately post-Anora world, that there really is every possibility that a filmmaker's unbelievably shitty and cheap and tedious first movie is not necessarily the limit of their potential.  I suppose I don't want to oversell it, though it is the kind of thing that activates a zealous advocacy, born out of sympathy and shame alike: I want to proselytize for it because Cuckoo isn't actually widely-liked, and I think it must've flown under the radar of the people who would've enjoyed it more; but even though it seems actively difficult to make a $7 million horror film, let alone a good one, that actually straight-up flops, that's somehow exactly what happened here, and I didn't help.

But: what we have before us now is basically an X-Files monster-of-the-week episode, only with no Mulder or Scully to do the heavy lifting.  Instead, we have Gretchen (Schafer), the seventeen year-old daughter of an architect (or some profession along similar lines), Luis (Marton Csokas), who has dragged his American child across an ocean and all the way to the Bavarian Alps so he can build a hotel for the prim but unsettlingly-friendly resort mogul, Koenig (Dan Stevens).  More enthusiastic about this relocation is Gretchen's stepmother Beth (Jessica Henwick), whom Gretchen essentially hates, and Gretchen's half-sister, Alma (Mila Lieu), whom Gretchen at least does not appear to much like, given that the first words out of our heroine's mouth are how her mute younger sibling's inability to speak is "fucking annoying," though she has, nonetheless, learned some level of a semi-functional smattering of jerry-rigged sign language.  (At least I don't think the sign in any system for the word "message," especially in the context of an audio message, is "pantomime texting on a cellphone.")  But let's have some empathy for Gretchen's position; her abduction to a foreign land by what amounts to a brand new family comes on the heels of her actual mother's recent death, which she is taking all kinds of not well.  Hence, primarily just to get away from these people, she accepts Koenig's offer of a part-time job at his existing resort, where she runs the front desk, largely with diffidence and surliness, though she's a little nicer to the attractive woman she tries to run off to Paris with (and from there, according to her plan, the airport, and back to America), which unfortunately only results in a big crack-up on the mountain highways.  You see, something (Kalin Morrow) is chasing Gretchen, something that's been haunting these Bavarian hills, and it isn't quite human, though Gretchen couldn't have been quite certain it was there until it caused the wreck that busted up her body, whereupon the local detective Henry (Singer repertory player Jan Bluthardt), the only one who believes her, confirms that this something is very real, while, for various reasons, not least that it killed his wife, it needs to die.

It is no sin of the movie that you're ahead of it most of the time, and that you'll have pieced together all of the stuff that makes it an X-Files by about the time Morrow's monster—"the Hooded Woman" according to the credits, but why shouldn't we just call it the Cuckoo?  I mean, really—makes its first appearance, if, indeed, you haven't pieced it together within a hundred twenty seconds of the movie opening, even if you'd never seen a trailer, didn't know it was a horror movie, and didn't know what it was called till the title drop.  The novelty is in the details, to no small degree in the imaginative monster(s) Singer has envisioned, a sci-fi-glossed (if extremely scientifically implausible) supernatural adversary with interesting powers, afforded a very cool cryptid kind of vibe, yet without being too limited by what "cryptid" would usually imply (possibly the "uncoolest" thing about them is that they don't quite seem to have the intellect their outward appearance would dictate, but for one, we have a horror-thriller to do so I understand not picking at that too much, and for two, there's an effective evocation of an inhuman intelligence that we simply cannot comprehend).  The Cuckoo just looks neat: a superstrong, superfast hooded figure who tends to pop in the dark backgrounds even when she remains a creature from beyond the focal plane (her hood is beige) and who has a penchant for wearing unusually evil sunglasses (at night!). Conceptually, though, the cuckoos amount to a tremendously interesting experiment: how close to "just human" can you make what is, reductively, an Alien xenomorph—a brood parasite is still a parasite, and what that amounts to with human victims is what you would categorically describe as "a rape monster"—before triggering that whole "about something," allegorical mode of thinking about a horror movie monster, when the movie would prefer you to react to its sexual terror instinctually and emotionally rather than intellectually, as an expression of nightmare, rather than social ill?

But I think that's second-order and, probably, not intentional; one thing Luz at least suggested was that Singer would be good at mood and atmosphere, and with the expanded canvas of an actual budget, an automatically-spooky location, and a screenplay that isn't just the same handful of lines over and over again, Cuckoo proves he really does have horror chops.  There's a terrific fun-scary heaviness that settles onto things from the get-go, and a very agreeable not-quite-throwback aesthetic: Cuckoo was shot on 35mm by Paul Faltz, and it does what 35mm is good at, presenting a world that has a filmic sheen but feels very tangible and real, while offering the possibility of capturing light just a little off to the side of reality, so we get a lot of oppressively blown-out daylight here, and a lot of nice night-for-night that's still very intentionally-lit, and even the sleek "modernist Gothic" accoutrements, that have kind of gotten worn out over the past fifteen or so years of horror, have the imposing alpine landscape to help revitalize them.

Meanwhile, Singer—this is new for him—has acquired a sense of how to gradually harden his compositional style as we pass from the faint dread of simply moving to a new country to the much sharper horror of being chased by some kind of crazed raptor woman, with stops along the way towards completely disorienting psychedelia-adjacent horror as some outside force inflicts "time loops" on the monster's victims along with the burliest efforts of the great sound design* and a lot of extreme close-ups of warbling "human" throats that never stop being nauseatingly gross and wrong.  There's a ton of just outstandingly solid horror craftsmanship here, though I think my favorite full-on horror setpiece is the first appearance of the monster, chasing Gretchen on her bike, though the monster's on foot, a triumph of getting something altogether uncanny out of something that could be goofy, and a splendid piece of stalking by any standard, making us aware of only the barest sense of the threat, and making Gretchen aware only as its shadow begins overlapping her own on the pavement beneath a strobing series of streetlights, and I got the honest-to-God shivers from it.

And while that shows us that Singer is good at staging scares—and he will remain so even as the scale expands (by the standards of Cuckoo, anyway) to "Aliens, and I do mean specifically Aliens with an 's,' in a mad science hospital's basement"—there's demonstration of the equally valuable skill of just telling a story with actors and dialogue and a camera, if to a lesser degree.  Singer is, let's be clear, superb at creating an atmosphere of compelling mystery, and he even sticks the landing, when the mystery is largely dispelled and we know everything, something that's rare enough in this kind of horror that it's kind of amazing all by itself; without even being hyperbolic, the overall effect is what you'd imagine if there was an early David Cronenberg script that a mid-career John Carpenter directed, and was also suspected to have been rewritten by the latter a touch.  But that script is more obviously flawed than Singer's direction, and I think it's easy to find where the flaws in it lie: if you guessed that Gretchen will, at a certain point, shift to a more protective attitude towards her sister, who herself increasingly shows signs of something threatening her, well, you've clearly seen a movie before, so that's great.  But this shift unfortunately happens like Singer flipped a switch on Gretchen's character, rather than something that's come out of a more organic softening that, hell, probably only would've taken a single scene to do justice (it's what I mean by Cuckoo maybe being too short, despite that being my statistically least-likely complaint about any movie).  I almost wonder if at some point that that scene was there, because my recollection of the movie's chronology is that it somehow comes after an interaction that would only make Gretchen like Alma even less; but, whether or not it once was, that scene ain't here now.  And this is, itself, a sign of a modest but more thoroughgoing problem, a first act that is clearly a little bit rushed, in that we only get our initial feel for Gretchen out of a clomping series of expositional bytes and plot points.

The better news is that's pretty much the only problem with Schafer's performance—which is to say, the problem with Gretchen is entirely apart from Schafer herself—and it's an awfully good performance, starting with a good physicality for the kind of punk-adjacent teen girl guitarist who carries a butterfly knife and sneers at everything she sees, so recognizable that I spent a little time wondering if this was a period piece for Elder Millennials (and I don't know where the rock songs on this movie's soundtrack are even coming from, except "I guess Europe?", but they're good).  Somewhat riskily, she's not asking you to like Gretchen much, for, to be frank, she's kind of a bitch to start, arguably immature even for a seventeen year-old (and, hell, arguably a little dim, too), all sharp edges and bad judgment, but she's afforded a pretty good excuse, and while there's a certain monotony to this character and even Schafer's execution thereof, that actually winds up paying off, with the intensity of her resentments and grief and desperate unspecific teen yearning capturing your pity after all.  And there's a capacity for kindness that's slightly startling, but which Schafer's done the prefatory work for; basically, Schafer's doing a lot right, even when her character is only ever so much boilerplate, to the extent that somehow Schafer explaining Gretchen's convenient recourse to expressing grief by calling her mom's answering machine—a conceit that I'm only just short of calling "lazy writing"—actually redeems that conceit.

But, you know, "boilerplate" isn't a synonym for "bad," and it's hard not to root for the realistically battle-damaged woman in a horror-thriller (Cuckoo, even entirely apart from its rad monster, and however quietly, has some of 2024's very best effects makeup to chronicle Gretchen's post-wreck recovery).  Opposing her, we have a more one-dimensionally flamboyant performance from Stevens, though I'm not sure I've ever enjoyed him more in anything I've ever seen him in, a gorgeously classical mad scientist turn that you'll routinely see described as "campy," and of course it is, but it's such disciplined camp, a hugely buttoned-down and strait-laced kind of "obvious maniac"; playing what is, with near-explicitness, a comic parody of a Nazi eugenicist, Stevens is completely unwilling to let Koenig himself in on the joke.

And that's kind of where Cuckoo lands: a horror programmer that completely owns simply being a horror programmer, built around a creative-enough, distinctive-enough premise that's its own special kind of satisfying, pursued with demonstrable passion by folks who apparently think horror programmers are the best thing in the world, and made with the wisdom that a lighter touch is often the best way to get an audience to the point where they have enough affection for a film to discover what it's "about" for themselves.  Maybe there are a few problems I haven't mentioned: if Simon Waskow actually did provide a score, I barely even noticed it (but then, as noted, it's a movie more about sound design); and while it has exactly the ending it wants and it's good, it's almost too nice, for the classical conclusion to such a mad science tale as Cuckoo would be predictably nihilistic—but then, I suppose the movie hasn't wanted us to be on Henry's side of the three-sided argument that Gretchen wins).  So those aren't even real problems, and for a few reasons, I could really see this having a longer lifespan below the pop cultural waterline than might otherwise be the case.

Score: 8/10

*I believe the individuals to credit are Jeffrey A. Pitts, Odin Benitez, and Jonas Lux.