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Nathan Weinbender reviews "Cuckoo"

Film still of Hunter Schafer as Gretchen in Cuckoo (2024).
Film still of Hunter Schafer as Gretchen in Cuckoo (2024).

NATHAN WEINBENDER:

Before the year is over, I’d love to see a horror film that actually delivers on its early promise and holds up all the way to the end. Within the last month and a half we got MaXXXine and Longlegs and Trap, all of which have terrific, hypnotic first acts and all of which had their power sapped away as they unspooled, like sandcastles crumbling in the rising tides. And now we have Cuckoo, yet another summertime supernatural thriller that starts strong before descending into goofiness.

It begins with a family on a winding mountain road heading deep into the Bavarian Alps. Gretchen (Hunter Schaefer) is the sullen 17-year-old traveling with her father (Márton Csókás), his second wife (Jessica Henwick) and their young daughter (Mila Lieu), who doesn’t speak. They’re clearly reverberating from an unspoken tragedy.

Dad’s boss, an unctuous man called Herr König (Dan Stevens), is there to greet them. Is he a venture capitalist, or a scientist, or some kind of real estate magnate? We’re not sure, but Stevens has clearly been cast for his toothy grin, which can be charming or menacing depending on the angle of the camera. Gretchen’s family is put up in an ultra-modernist home, and the only other things around them are a hotel where Gretchen works behind the reception desk, and a hospital that seems to have a pretty sophisticated neurological department despite its apparent lack of patients.

Strange things happen. Guests of the hotel keep vomiting in the same spot in the lobby. Deafening sounds keep emanating from the surrounding forest, so intense they alter linear time. An odd woman in dark glasses and an overcoat pops out of the shadows and chases Gretchen on her bike.

For awhile, Cuckoo is a lot of creepy fun. The setting, this strange resort that seems to exist in another era altogether, makes us think of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining, which is high praise. The film also creates a sense of disorientation that recalls films like Don’t Look Now and The Wicker Man, both of which capture that uncanny feeling of being far from home in a place where the language and cultural norms are a mystery to you.
 
Then we hit the third act. As with Longlegs, the screenplay has been structured in such a way that its scenario practically demands explanation, so it supplies not one but two characters who unload reams of exposition. But that exposition both explains too much and not enough, and the further the movie gets from the cerebral and the inexplicable intrigue of that first act, the less effective it is.

Writer-director Tilman Singer at least leaves us with some intriguing, nagging questions, even if he doesn’t ramp up the climax to the nutty intensity it needs. Cuckoo is only his second feature, following 2018’s Luz, an ultra-low budget supernatural mystery that relied on abstract dialogue and liminal spaces. He’s already quite good at developing an atmosphere you don’t want to look away from, even as his script betrays it.

For Spokane Public Radio, I'm Nathan Weinbender.

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Nathan Weinbender is a film critic and one of the regular co-hosts for Spokane Public Radio’s Movies 101, heard Friday evenings at 6:30 PM here on KPBX.

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  • On this week’s show, Dan Webster, Nathan Weinbender, and Mary Pat Treuthart discuss a pair of films that, each in its own particular way, tries to hold an audience’s attention. The first is the offbeat exercise in existential horror, “Cuckoo,” while the second is a film about the chance relationship between a young woman and an older cab driver titled “Daddio.”