While the third season of Euphoria seems less likely with each passing day, its stars are busier than ever. Zendaya had the one-two punch of Challengers and Dune earlier this year. Jacob Elordi has become a full-on heartthrob, Colmon Domingo may get another run at an Oscar thanks to Sing Sing and now, Hunter Schafer gets her first starring role in writer-director Tilman Singer’s new film Cuckoo.
Schafer plays Gretchen, a teenager who moves to a remote resort in the German Alps with her father’s new family after her mother’s death. The resort’s charismatic if creepy owner is Mr. König (Dan Stevens), who offers Gretchen a job working the front desk to pass the time. However, as the guests’ behavior becomes more disturbing and Gretchen’s younger step-sister, Alma, (Mila Lieu) is afflicted with a mysterious illness, Gretchen begins to suspect that something sinister is happening at the resort.
Much of that sinister mood is thanks to Stevens’s König. This is his second horror movie of the year after April’s silly, bloody Abigail, and the performance he gives here is even more outlandish. From the second we meet him, König is smarmy, flirting with Gretchen’s stepmother (Jessica Henwick) right in front of her father (Márton Csókás) and letting his hand linger just a little too long on Gretchen’s shoulders. He only gets more suspicious from there. The performance is so bizarre that it feels as if we’re seeing what would happen if Dracula entered the tourism industry. It’s so off-putting, frankly, that it becomes hard to understand why Gretchen is the only one who seems freaked out. Late in the film, when König interrupts a family fight to play a wooden flute, Gretchen’s outrage at his weirdness finally gives the audience permission to laugh at him.
Throughout, the film’s touches of absurdity and extreme weirdness often undercut its foreboding tone. While comedy can be a great way for a horror movie to break tension, here, the audience is occasionally left wondering whether it’s laughing with or at Singer’s choices. While the aforementioned whistle moment works, characters like a greasy local cop or Beatrix (Greta Fernández), the bratty floozy who also works the resort’s front desk, feel like self-aware winks to the audience. You can feel Singer nudging the audience to laugh and many a viewer’s arm will be sore from the constant prodding.
While the film’s commitment to weirdness flirts dangerously with camp, it’s much better at keeping both Gretchen and the audience on edge with more traditional tricks. Singer never lets the viewer settle. Anytime the film lingers too long on König’s eccentricities or one of the resort guests puking, some loud noise or other erratic behavior keeps us from having the time to analyze it. On one hand, these are just classic jumpscares, but because they happen so consistently and continuously, the overall effect is to leave the viewer anxious and paranoid. We’re constantly expecting some new shock and it makes the scenes when that threatening atmosphere suddenly manifests in real danger all the more potent.
Take the sequence when Gretchen, against König’s orders, bikes home in the dark after her shift. Before then, we only sense something is in the woods because of the heinous screeching noises that constantly echo through it and composer Simón Waskow’s foreboding score. But we catch our first glimpse of that threat thanks to cinematographer Paul Faltz, who keeps the shots wide and dark throughout the scene. As we look at Gretchen head on, we see a figure streak behind and then along side her. She, unlike the viewer, is oblivious to the threat because of the music blasting through her headphones, but (in a moment unfortunately spoiled in the trailers) her panic matches ours when she finally sees the shadow of the thing pursuing her. From there, the scene is viscerally terrifying and the fear it creates only intensifies as the film frays our nerves more and more.
While viewers who know anything about how cuckoo birds reproduce will have an inkling of what that creature might be doing (and those who don’t won’t be told until the film’s last act), all that background scheming and the sharp moments of violence would be wasted if the eventual plot weren’t heinous. It will go unspoiled here, but the body horror and grotesquery are enough to make the audience not only want to see Gretchen escape, but to keep us squirming until the credits.
While Cuckoo suffers from the self-aware audience winking that plagues so much modern horror, it ultimately succeeds thanks to strong filmmaking and the way it delivers on all its menace. Sure, everyone except a few of our main characters acts like a ghoul and there are times when we laugh at the film rather than with it, but its scares are good enough to keep viewers on the edge of their seats.
