When you find a stranger in the Alps
'Cuckoo' is a wild silly ride that plays like 'Malignant' meets 'The Beekeeper' in the German Alps.
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I was trying to find a movie to review for this weekend and it felt like slim pickings at my local. I’m late to the party on Trap and Longlegs, and in the case of Trap, I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to wade into the Shyamalan discourse again anyway. I simply can’t see what Shyamalan Guys see (Letterboxd in bio), and I know this from experience.
Deadpool & Wolverine (aka the Cards Against Humanity of superhero movies) I already saw, and after that, what else was there? Everyone seems to hate Borderlands (10% on RottenTomatoes), and it’s based on a videogame I never played. After Madame Web, I probably don’t need to see another disastrous IP-based film this year; there’s simply no way it will be as tragilicious as Madame Web. It Ends With Us (a Blake Lively Colleen Hoover adaptation) is apparently doing big business, but after watching the trailer, the movie felt redundant.
And that mostly left Cuckoo, a weird little movie I didn’t know and hadn’t heard much about. Sometimes that’s just what you want.
Cuckoos. They lay their eggs in other birds’ nests and they’re the main character of a clock. Probably the most popular of the clock birds. Somehow, this becomes the basis for a horror movie in Cuckoo, a woolly lark whose best quality is that it’s a bit deranged.
Some of my best ideas are the ones that spark an internal debate over whether they’re too dumb to express out loud, and some of my favorite movies are the kind that feel like someone took exactly that kind of 3 am idea and ran with it, building and building until finally they had a feature-length screenplay and finished film that all started with a notion like “What if horror baddie like clock bird?”
What if indeed! Writer/director Tilman Singer is German, a people known to be both dowdily sensible and abjectly perverse. Cuckoo embodies that duality as a film, a mundane idea with traditional trappings that gets exponentially more loony (cuckoo?) as it goes, like a twisted combination of Malignant and The Beekeeper.
Malignant, if you’ll remember, was a James Wan film about a woman with an evil malformed twin living on the back of her skull. The Beekeeper starred Jason Statham and was based on the idea that some bees are called “queen slayers,” whose job is exactly like it sounds. The entire movie consisted of Statham, in his official duties as the supra-governmental body known as “beekeeper,” trying to slay “the queen”. Cuckoos, you may have read at some point, lay their eggs in other birds’ nests, tricking those other birds into feeding and rearing their offspring while outbreeding them.
Hunter Schafer (Euphoria) plays Gretchen, a bratty, angsty teen who has been sent to live with her father’s new family after her mother dies (offscreen mothers always get the worst of it, don’t they?). She doesn’t seem to like her father, stepmother, or younger half sister much, and she likes even less having to move to a remote town in the Bavarian Alps where the whole gang has relocated in order to work on some kind of resort project with Gretchen’s father’s friend, Herr König, played by Dan Stevens.
Inasmuch as Cuckoo is a high concept about evil cuckoo humans, the root of any story, as a writing professor once explained, is people and place. Cuckoo is about as good an illustration of that as exists. It wouldn’t work just anywhere (I hate when movies try to be set anywhere and everywhere), only in the Bavarian Alps, which Singer makes the most of in on-location photography. Otherworldly, isolated, with towering picturesque mountain backdrops by day and long, creepy shadows come dawn and dusk and inky forests by night, with tourists drifting in and out while a skeleton crew of kooky locals tries to keep things together, it’s kind of every horror movie setting rolled into one.
Meanwhile, Dan Stevens, the almost comically handsome Englishman who broke out playing the babyface in Downton Abbey, works brilliantly playing against type as a German creepo whose symmetrical face, cozy sweaters, and calm manner surely mask some dastardly deviance. “I’m a preservationist,” he purrs, and your mind instantly conjures concentration camp medical experiments.
König gives Gretchen a job working the desk at his resort on the first day, while seeming suspiciously adamant that she not work after dark or ride her bike home after work. On her first shift, she sees a woman wandering around the snack bar in a daze, who then vomits on the floor. “This is not unusual,” says the disinterested veteran desk girl, Beatrix (Greta Fernandez) absent-mindedly flipping magazine pages.
Fernandez has the kind of casually striking European features so angular you could shape blown glass on her, and one of Cuckoo’s great strengths is that every actor’s face seems to tell a story all its own. Gretchen eventually meets the Bohemian Ed, played by Astrid Bergès-Frisbey, a human gauloise who seems as eager to leave the Alps as Gretchen is. Then there’s Henry, a wild-eyed police detective who wants Gretchen’s help to investigate a murder, played by Jan Bluthardt, whose face looks like a “we have Michael Fassbender at home” meme. There’s also Trixie’s sweaty cop boyfriend, Erik, played by Konrad Singer, a younger, hotter Peter Stormare. Every actor in Cuckoo seems to have their own uncanny valley doppleganger.
All the while, Gretchen is pursued by a mysterious hooded woman in big white sunglasses who seems to cause temporal anomalies whenever she appears. Cuckoos are the clock birds, remember? Obviously they can control time! The hooded woman makes Gretchen hurt herself every time she appears, to the point that Gretchen is more bandaged and be-slinged than Nordberg from the Naked Gun after barely 30 minutes of screentime (who was the character Kilgore Trout invented just to torture?). Naturally no one really believes Gretchen about the hooded woman (save for the crazy detective, Henry), and her family mostly thinks she’s just acting out to make things harder for her stepmom, Beth (Jessica Henwick), and her half sister, Alma (Mila Lieu), who is mute and epileptic.