By Terry Sherwood
A well-known streaming service is now using the term “High Brow horror’ as a category. Amazingly one wonders if that is needed only for those who don’t normally watch genre films, to feel that they are watching something legitimate. Sort of the ‘coffee table’ book of refined genre viewing. Setting between Art, Horror, and social comment films, we have the exquisitely confusing film Cuckoo by writer / Director Tilman Singer.
The picture deals with the theme of grief, reproduction, and gender expectations layered with a folk Horror motif. After rather a stylish opening that will come back later in the film with a young woman running into the local woods with audio of a terrible parental confrontation happening, Cuckoo shifts to introduce seventeen-year-old Gretchen (Hunter Schafer) The moody teen wears as she is living with her father, Luis (Marton Csókás), stepmother Beth (Jessica Henwick), and her mute 7-year-old stepsister Alma (Mila Lieu) to the Bavarian Alps. Gretchen won’t even travel it her parents instead she is with the men in the moving van following the family car.
The resort where they will live is where Alma was conceived. Gretchen is grieving over the loss of her mother, whose memory she holds when calling their old phone and leaving messages. Like some children, when a new mother or father comes into their family, she feels unwanted. The Resort owner/ family friend, Mr. König (Dan Stevens), makes her feel even more uncomfortable through lingering shoulder touches. gives her a job at the resort front desk. Gretchen is so unsettled by Mr. König that she ignores his desperate pleas to be home before dark, leading to an inventive encounter with pursuing creatures while on her bike including a stalking, shrieking woman.
Director Tilman Singer gives the picture a hypnotic repetition of sequences that occur over and over again, each time building from body tremors, shimmer and a high-pitched shriek accompanying this structure locking the victim into a time loop similar to Ground Hog Day (1993) with Bill Murray and The Shout (1978) starring Alan Bates.
Mr. König. (Dan Stevens) character is the friend who later is revealed to control the bizarre screaming creature by playing a series of notes on a recorder that perhaps is in homage to Bela Lugosi’s Ygor from Universal Studios Son of Frankenstein (1939) and Ghost of Frankenstein (1942). The picture gets odder as more hypnotic moments happen, a policeman with a vendetta shows up, and Gretchen suddenly goes off to Paris with a gay female lover who will reoccur in the film. Toss in screaming monsters, car wrecks and an Automatic weapon showdown
A lot of material was put in by Director Singer who is said to march to his own drum. Well, sometimes the drum isn’t tuned to the right tone or does not follow the band making Cuckoo confused in trying to follow and unsatisfying at the end. Positively the work is brilliantly photographed with great Bavarian scenery, a lonely big hotel lots of little characters that seem to have been forgotten. This masks a very committed performance thanks to a physical, emotional and committed performance from Hunter Schafer in the role of Gretchen.
The doctor’s previous efforts Luz (2018) was a backward treatise on Love, relationships and the concept of the lonely Demon that again involves a repetitive location such as a police station Cuckoo is simply odd stuff if you want to sort out who these screaming people are and why they are here. Did I mention that vaginal discharge gets use ominous effect? Somewhere there might be a dark fairy tale about the importance of letting females have reproductive rights, the birthright of children and the importance of the family unit however the message gets muddled making this what some will call ‘High Brow Horror”.
Cuckoo is available now on DVD & Blu-Ray.
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