CUCKOO (2024)

Studio:   Neon
Director: Tilman Singer
Writer:   Tilman Singer
Producer: Markus Halberschmidt, Josh Rosenbaum, Maria Tsigka, Ken Kao, Thor Bradwell, Ben Rimmer
Stars:    Hunter Schafer, Jan Bluthardt, Marton Csokas, Jessica Henwick, Dan Stevens, Mila Lieu, Greta Fernandez, Proschat Madani

Review Score:

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Summary:

When her family relocates to a remote resort in Germany, a troubled teenager becomes unwittingly involved in a mysterious man's unusual experiments.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Still mourning the death of her mother, 17-year-old Gretchen Vanderkurt reluctantly moves with her father Luis, stepmother Beth, and mute half-sister Alma to a remote resort in Germany's Bavarian Alps where Beth plans to become a housekeeper while Luis builds a new resort with property owner Herr Konig, with whom the couple was previously acquainted. In addition to Konig, Gretchen meets Dr. Bonomo, who practices medicine and performs scientific research at a nearby hospital.

Gretchen accepts Konig's offer to work as a front desk receptionist for the resort. During training with her coworker Beatrix, Gretchen notices a female guest vomiting in the lobby.

A strange shrieking noise emanating from the surrounding forest causes Alma to experience convulsions. Seeing her sister suffering, Gretchen removes her headphones. The unknown sounds cause time to inexplicably skip and loop for Gretchen until Alma violently attacks her.

Luis and Beth begin taking Alma to the hospital for her seizures. Gretchen observes the female guest vomiting again while stumbling as though entranced. Gretchen also takes a mutual interest in a female guest named Ed.

During a night shift, Konig calls Gretchen with a warning that she should never be alone after 10pm. Dismissing Konig's call, Gretchen bikes home in the dark. A Hooded Woman frightens Gretchen by furiously chasing after her on foot while shrieking, which Gretchen doesn't hear due to wearing headphones. Gretchen rushes to the hospital for help, but the Hooded Woman vanishes by the time two police officers arrive.

Identifying himself as a police investigator, a man named Henry comes to the resort to ask Gretchen about her encounter with the Hooded Woman. Gretchen brushes him off to attend to Ed, with whom she subsequently smokes, kisses, and agrees to run away to Paris together.

On their drive, time inexplicably starts skipping and looping again for Gretchen. Ed crashes her car when she swerves to avoid the Hooded Woman in the middle of the road. The Hooded Woman crawls toward Gretchen while she lies seriously injured. Gretchen hears a gunshot before blacking out.

Gretchen wakes in the hospital. Konig cryptically threatens Gretchen about not going places where she shouldn't be. Luis also dismisses his daughter by repeatedly refusing to believe her claims of a Hooded Woman stalking her.

Henry revisits Gretchen. Henry tells her the Hooded Woman is a murderer and he needs Gretchen's help to find her, but she cannot tell anyone because no one can be trusted. Gretchen agrees to help after Henry promises to protect her.

Henry explains that one month earlier, a married couple rented a pink cabin on the property. The husband lost consciousness one night. The husband later told police that when he recovered, he chased away a blonde woman with a hypnotic voice and discovered his wife choked to death on her own vomit.

Gretchen remembers the vomiting woman from the lobby also rented the same pink cabin. Henry and Gretchen stake out the cabin and discover Gretchen's coworker Beatrix having an affair with Erik, the police officer who took Gretchen's statement at the hospital. Time starts skipping when the strange shrieking is heard. Cradling a mysterious slime in her hand, the Hooded Woman appears and begins crawling toward Beatrix's legs while she lies unconscious. Gretchen and Henry interrupt. Henry fires his gun, causing the Hooded Woman to run away.

Gretchen wakes at home the next morning. Gretchen confronts both Luis and Konig with accusations over what's really going on at the resort, but no one directly addresses her questions.

Gretchen learns her father sold their house in America when a package containing her mother's belongings arrives. The package contains an answering machine Gretchen routinely called to hear her mother's voice. To Gretchen's surprise, the machine's tape also includes a message from Alma, who doesn't know Gretchen's mother died, imploring her to finally call Gretchen back and possibly visit because it would make her sister happy.

While Luis and Beth are supposedly back at the hospital with Dr. Bonomo for Alma's seizures, Konig catches Gretchen swiping Luis's car keys. Konig offers to personally drive Gretchen to the train station to run away, but only after she writes a goodbye letter first. Konig then drives Gretchen to a house where Erik has Henry held hostage. Konig reveals Henry was actually dismissed from the police for personally investigating his wife's death, revealing Henry as the cabin-renting husband whose wife choked on her own vomit.

Konig sprays Gretchen with pheromones before locking her in a pool room converted to a bedroom. Over a loudspeaker, Konig partially explains that the sounds from the woods come from Homo-Cuculidae, an ancient species of human and cuckoo bird hybrids that he is committed to preserving through a secret process where homo-cuculidae offspring are implanted in surrogate mothers and raised to adolescence, but as a unique evolutionary trait they developed, that's when the biological mothers emerge from the wild to reclaim their children.

Emitting the shrieking sound, an adolescent homo-cuculidae girl, who previously escaped her human guardians, attacks Gretchen. The girl grabs mysterious slime from between her legs and begins reaching toward Gretchen, but Konig uses musical notes from his flute to stop her.

Henry breaks free from his restraints, shoots the two cops guarding him, shoots Konig, and shoots the feral girl. Meanwhile, Beth begins vomiting while at the hospital.

Gretchen also vomits. Henry discovers a photograph of Luis and Beth meeting Konig on their honeymoon, confirming Alma is a homo-cuculidae offspring previously implanted in Beth.

Henry and Gretchen rush to the hospital. From secretly observing Dr. Bonomo as she experiments on Alma, Henry and Gretchen additionally learn that surrogates become distressed when they're in close proximity with the biological mothers, causing them to vomit. Bonomo prepares to test a close-distance encounter between Alma and her biological mother, which speeds up development of the offspring's physiology and abilities.

Having survived Henry's gunshot, Konig arrives at the hospital. To conceal evidence of his experiments, Konig executes Bonomo and her assistant. Konig next prepares to shoot Alma. Gretchen stabs Henry when he tries to stop her from rescuing Alma. Gretchen collects Alma after Henry exits to burn paper records.

The shrieking sound causes Alma to convulse again. With the Hooded Woman approaching, Gretchen threateningly holds a knife above Alma's head to freeze the woman. Alma pushes Gretchen and runs away. Gretchen pursues her.

Alma runs to Konig with Henry right behind her, initiating a gunfight between the two men. Meanwhile, the Hooded Woman stalks Gretchen, who ultimately kills the Hooded Woman by stabbing her in the throat.

Gretchen finds Alma and regains her trust by claiming her mother heard Alma's message and thanks Alma for reconnecting her with Gretchen. While Konig openly laments that Gretchen is competing for resources with Alma when Beth should be focused on breeding and reproduction to ensure new generations of homo-cuculidae become more powerful, Gretchen cradles Alma and walks between Konig and Henry to prevent them from firing at each other. With Henry warning Gretchen about Alma and Konig worried about the species going extinct, Alma uses her shrieking ability to disorient the men so she and Gretchen can escape safely.

After Gretchen and Alma leave, Konig and Henry shoot at each other. Outside the hospital, Gretchen and Alma find Ed in a hospital gown. Ed, Gretchen, and Alma drive away together.

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Review:

You wouldn't know it from the premise, or from its outward appearance as a slightly surreal psycho-thriller, but "Cuckoo" is a coming-of-age story set inside a fright film. It's not nostalgic or sentimental like "Stand by Me." It's not even off-kilter like "Lisa Frankenstein" (review here). "Cuckoo" is weirder than that. Imagine the hypnotic horror of Panos Cosmatos meets David Lynch dreaminess with an arty A24 style whirled together in a macabre midnight movie, yet still approachable for mainstream audiences who want to walk on the wilder side for 100 minutes. "Cuckoo" is that kind of weird.

17-year-old Gretchen misses her recently deceased mother. She misses her even more now that she's stuck in the Bavarian Alps with her father Luis, stepmother Beth, and mute half-sister Alma. The family traded America for Germany so Beth and Luis can help Herr Konig build a new resort to replace the one he currently owns on a campus with a research hospital. Gretchen even gets in on the business, accepting an offer to become a front desk receptionist who rents out the hotel's rooms.

Between the awkward doctor from that nearby hospital to the hotel guest who repeatedly vomits in the lobby, Resort Alpschatten has no shortage of unusual denizens. Oddness soon escalates into unsettling circumstances whenever shrieking emanates from the surrounding forest, causing everything from trance-like convulsions for Alma to time suddenly skipping and inexplicably restarting for Gretchen. Confused unease then becomes outright terror when a hooded woman emerges from the darkness to frantically chase down Gretchen before disappearing just as mysteriously as she materialized.

What could possibly be going on here? Pull every prediction you can from previous suspense films set at remote resorts or isolated clinics. Are anomalies part of an imagined fantasy a la "Shutter Island?" Is a mad scientist conducting clandestine experiments as in "A Cure for Wellness" (review here)? Maybe it's a bit of both and then some? Wonder all you want, then throw your guess in the garbage, because the details driving "Cuckoo's" strange sights and stranger sounds are too out of the ordinary to see coming. You can certainly see how particular people and pieces fit into a puzzle, but the full reveal concocts a concept that's creatively creepy enough to earn admiration from a diabolical comic book villain, and I mean that as a compliment.

The movie doesn't work toward a Shyamalan-style bombshell or mind-blowingly bonkers twist. Rather, "Cuckoo" warps itself sideways by leaning into B-movie bizarreness befitting the lightly hallucinatory texture and mind-going-mad tone. "Cuckoo" piles on sinister suggestiveness with a vaguely "Silent Hill"-like soundtrack, too. Not with the heart-pounding noisiness of Pyramid Head chasing a hero through a hospital's blood-caked hallways, but with the echoing eeriness of exploring the cursed town in quieter moments.

Amid occasionally dizzying weirdness, "Cuckoo" stays centered thanks to the remarkable writing, directing, and acting that goes into establishing Gretchen as the grounding element. I say remarkable because the troubled teen stereotype is so easy to turn into a trope, and so easy for audiences to find obnoxious, it's incredible for "Cuckoo" to create a take where her rebellious angst is relatable instead of annoying.

In presenting attitudinal teens, movies often open with them blatantly disrespecting others while insolently huffing and puffing. Gretchen doesn't care for her stepmother or her half-sister, but she ignores them in a manner where she mostly avoids them rather than hurl undeserved insults to make her the center of attention. Also, instead of moping, Gretchen mourns her mother's passing in emotionally devastating moments where actor Hunter Schafer's heartbroken tears easily earn sympathy. Even Gretchen's habit of shutting out the rest of the world via headphones ends up being a plot point when it could have been one more example of her echoing every other onscreen teen with an unearned ax to grind.

What makes or breaks the movie for any individual comes down to whether the narrative earns a satisfied smirk or an exasperated groan. Until the fiction completely emerges from a fog with the last wisps of third act exposition, "Cuckoo" can be maddening for anyone anxious to get every finger gripped around exactly what is happening and why. While most questions are answered, some aren't, likely leaving more than a few viewers flustered. Honestly, I wasn't even sure I fully followed along until I put my notes together for a detailed synopsis and saw that everything did, mostly, make sense in retrospect, even if it didn't in the moment.

To someone concerned about "Cuckoo's" cryptic nature, I'd insist it's not a movie for half-watching while crushing candies or scrolling social media. In addition to intermittent insertions of subtitled languages, "Cuckoo" has a hint of exotic flavors that make it an experience worth an immersion, and investment, of imagination. Remember, it's a weird one, which by definition means it's definitely not tailored to everyone's tastes.

Review Score: 65

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