This is true for all films, but especially for horror films: as soon as a scene, or even an image, becomes embedded in the memory and never leaves, something notable has been accomplished. This is true whether the film in question is successful or not. Cuckoo contains at least one such indelible passage: on a bike, at night, on an isolated country road, headphones on her ears, a teenage girl sees her shadow on the road… then that of a person chasing her. The reaction is primal, visceral: we are afraid. Deliciously afraid. Strange, uneven, but fascinating, the film itself unfortunately never really manages to maintain this state.
It follows Gretchen (Hunter Schafer, from the series Euphoria ; more presence than nuance), the said teenager, who spends her summer holidays against her will in the mountain hotel complex that her father (Marton Csokas, The Equalizer / The vigilante) and her mother-in-law (Jessica Henwick, Love and Monsters / Love and Monsters) were tasked with rejuvenating it. However, the place’s worrisome owner (Dan Stevens, The Guest, who steals the show) seems especially interested in Gretchen’s young half-sister, who is exhibiting symptoms of epilepsy.
What follows is a crazy story set against a backdrop of secret scientific experiments through which the title takes on its terrifying meaning.
From the independent production and distribution house Neon, subscribed to unique proposals such as Owner (Possessor), Parasite, Triangle of Sadness (No filter), Or Anatomy of a falland who has just had his biggest North American box office success with the brilliantly sinister Longlegs, Cuckoo is the second feature film by German director Tilman Singer. A festival success, his first film, Lightfavored an eccentric approach to horror, full of disconcerting outbursts, unusual flashes of brilliance and scathing humor.
In CuckooSinger continues his exploration of this vein, while taking up many of the biases and motifs seen in Light.
We think, in particular, of these characters whose spasms and convulsions hide astonishing gifts, or of the timeless dimension of the universe where an action takes place in which obsolete and recent technologies rub shoulders. Strong in shades of beige and brown, the sets display an assumed retro-kitsch side, while the image with pronounced grain evokes the 16 mm of yesteryear.
All this, as in Light.
Ambient strangeness
Visually, it’s very controlled, very stimulating. Except that narratively speaking, it’s completely different.
Indeed, Cuckoo is sometimes delightful, sometimes frustrating, the ambient strangeness sometimes seeming to be an end in itself. Between the cohesive and the arbitrary, the line is at times so thin that it disappears, even within the parameters of the otherwise very flexible internal logic that the film establishes.
In this specific case, more rigor would probably have meant more terror. What remains is this sinister, dark image of the protagonist being hunted by a shadow…