Gretchen and her father Luis, Stepmother Beth, and the mute half-sister Alma moves to a resort town in the Bavarian Alps. Gretchen doesn’t really want to, but she can’t live with her mother anymore and needs to come with them. Yay. Her family are going to help building a new hotel there, and upon arriving the buoyant Herr König offers Gretchen a job at the front desk where she even manages to meet a love interest. So…maybe things won’t be so bad after all? Then, strange and bad shit starts happening of course. Several women are entering the reception desk while vomiting, and she also has an encounter with a terrifying hooded woman. Things start getting even more serious when Gretchen meets a detective named Henry, who is investigating a murder that happened on the premises. On top of it all, Alma starts having seizures. Gretchen feels compelled to both get the fuck away from there and also to find out what’s up with this resort, which soon proves to put both herself and her entire family in danger.
Cuckoo is a horror film from 2024, written and directed by Tilman Singer. It premiered at the 74th Berlin International Film Festival on February 16, 2024, and was then released theatrically in the US on August 9, and later in Germany on August 29.
This is one of those movies where you (unless you’ve gone and gotten the entire plot spoiler from somewhere beforehand) have no idea what it will be going for. All you know is that it’s going to be one of those unraveling mystery packages where you’ll be sitting like a bit of a question mark for some time during the viewing. And indeed, already from the start you are immediately teased with several little nuggets about the protagonist and her struggles, not knowing much more than that she misses her mother and keeps calling her. Her relationship to her stepmother and half-sister are barely existent, and her relationship to her father is strained and filled with underlying hurt. Atmosphere-wise, the Bavarian Alps and the beautiful landscape fits rather well to give off an isolated feeling, which ironically couldn’t make too much of a difference to Gretchen as she’s already alone and isolated with her own struggles. Everything Gretchen experiences almost feels like the result of a shroom-induced fever dream, where everything is just…well…off. Everything just feels weird, odd, and totally cuckoo, and this surreal vibe throughout is not even the movie’s raison d’etre. Let’s just say that the movie’s title is actually more literal than you’d imagine.
We do get a fair amount of time with Gretchen wandering around, taking her bicycle out for some exploring, finding out one piece of the mystery puzzle after the other until things start falling into place. Eventually, once the mysteries are revealed, we do venture into a total sci-fi-fiddle-faddle territory where it doesn’t really…make too much sense, I guess? It’s very much making up its own logic, and in some ways this makes for an even more surreal and trippy experience where nothing seems to be grounded in reality. Like one of those dreams you have that starts off with a certain familiarity to real life, and then everything ventures into total cuckoo-land where you later realize that dreaming is often like being temporarily mentally insane. I personally think the odd and surreal choices for the story in Cuckoo works pretty well, but I can see how some people might be put off by it.
Overall, Cuckoo is a weird film with a slightly dreamlike vibe to it, focusing a lot on a surreal mood and atmosphere and ends up going places you probably didn’t expect beforehand.
Writer and director: Tilman Singer
Country & year: Germany/USA, 2024
Actors: Hunter Schafer, Jan Bluthardt, Marton Csokas, Jessica Henwick, Dan Stevens, Mila Lieu, Greta Fernández, Proschat Madani, Astrid Bergès-Frisbey, Konrad Singer, Kalin Morrow
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12349832/
