Cuckoo

German filmmaker Tillman Singer became a phenom on the festival circuit in 2019 for his experimental demonic horror Luz, but there was a creeping suspicion that it was undeniable style over substance. There’s more substance to his follow-up, the unsettling Cuckoo, but it’s squishy and malformed – and not in a good way.

Hunter Schafer (Euphoria, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes) plays Gretchen, a surly teen whose musical ambitions are overturned when her parents – well, father (Csokas) and stepmother (Henwick), more precisely and importantly – pick up sticks from the States and decamp to remote rural Bavaria to design a resort for Mr. König (The Guest’s Dan Stevens, master of accents). Gretchen is a stereotypical resentful teen, mourning for her dead mother and resentful of everyone, including her younger stepsister (Lieu), who happens to be mute.

If that’s not enough, there are disappearances, a wild-eyed cop, and an ululating woman in the woods, all of which is tied together with an oddly predictable and unimpressive bow. Shafer scowls and blunders through what’s supposed to be a dark learning experience, but Gretchen’s underwritten arc never gives any heft to the changes she’s supposed to go through. Singer’s attempts to create a modern Black Forest fairy tale all rely on leaps of imagination that would strain the credulity of even the most forgiving of small and sleepy children (for whom this is definitely not age-appropriate). There are so many underdeveloped themes that it’s not hard to see what Singer was trying to achieve, and how short he falls. Moreover, Luz was at least visually interesting: Bar a few diverting tricks, Cuckoo is an uninteresting brown and beige smear.

Thank goodness then for Stevens, who seems to take the preposterousness seriously – at least from a performance standpoint. Even after the clearly sinister König explains his more-than-slightly ridiculous plan, there are still more questions to be asked than Singer’s script ever realizes it needs to answer. Stevens, however, leaps into the part with glee, even as he desperately tries to avoid some of the more stomach-churning aspects of the “mad German scientist” trope. Instead, he channels all the camp ghoulishness of Ernest Thesiger as the whimsically deranged and knowingly creepy Dr. Pretorius in Bride of Frankenstein. At least with him around, Singer’s mad dream is half-realized.

A version of this review previously ran after the film's international premiere at the 2024 SXSW Film & TV Festival.