Expanding on the scope of his impressive but constrained 2018 debut (the demonic-possession-meets-therapeutic-improv-exercise “Luz”) while retaining that film’s bird-flipping attitude toward unnecessary niceties like coherent plotting or narrative logic, German director Tilman Singer makes what ought to be his breakthrough with “Cuckoo” an energetically outlandish fusion of stylish atmospherics, old-school reproductive horror and pro-flickknife advertorial. The profile of this highly enjoyable, unashamedly convoluted creepfest will be further raised by “Euphoria” star Hunter Schafer‘s terrific Final Girl performance and by Dan Stevens‘ hilariously eccentric villain, the second recent showcase for Stevens’ excellent spoken German after Maria Schrader’s “I’m Your Man.” Few are the films and fewer are the actors that can get such sinister mileage out of a character’s insistently Teutonic, semi-sibilant mispronunciation of the name “Gretchen.”
Gretchen, aka “Ggrraaytshayn” (Schafer) appears, initially, to be the cuckoo. Sent to live with her estranged father Luis (Marton Csokas), his second wife Beth (Jessica Henwick) and their mute, eight-year-old daughter Alma (Mila Lieu) just as they are decamping to a Bavarian Alpine resort, Gretchen is surly and homesick for the US, and for the mother whom she often telephones but who never picks up her calls. Luis and Beth spent their honeymoon here years ago, and became friendly with the resort’s wealthy, and very obviously insane owner, Herr König (Stevens) — a character so pristinely macabre that he could only have been written by a German with a finely honed instinct for how the rest of the world tends to caricature his countrymen. And now König has hired the couple to redesign the facility. Or at least that is the pretext he’s using for bringing them here.
The hotel’s underfurnished, midcentury modern interiors are certainly a little dated, though dated to when precisely is left deliberately fuzzy. “Cuckoo”‘s geographical location is clear, but its place in time far less so: Dario Mendez Acosta’s clever production design somehow combines smartphones and noise-cancelling headsets with cassette-tape answerphones and paper filing systems in a way that constantly wrongfoots us without ever feeling at odds with the film’s internal calendar. Anyway, almost as soon as the family arrives, weird stuff starts to go down, most of it centered on Gretchen in a way that makes her seem increasingly hysterical to Luis and Beth, even as the physical manifestations of her encounters with a mysterious, malevolent screeching blonde woman proliferate into multiple bruises and bandages, splints and slings. When Alma suddenly starts to develop epileptic seizure symptoms, the unsmiling doctor (Proschat Madani) at the handy but ill-defined on-site medical complex wonders if perhaps the family has recently experienced a traumatic event. All eyes swing inevitably to Gretchen. no wonder she tries to run away with attractive hotel guest Ed (Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey). Unfortunately for the would-be lesbian lovers on the run, crazy screaming lady — whose raspy yowl ensnares the listener in a juddering time loop — has other ideas.
At pinch, given the revelations about Gretchen’s mother and about Alma’s conception — which turns out to be a secret far worse than her merely having absorbed her twin in the womb — “Cuckoo” could loosely fit within the motherhood or grief-horror subgenres. But despite Paul Faltz’s classy cinematography and the nice line in 80s-style synth scoring from Simon Waskow, really Singer doesn’t have anything so conceptual or “elevated” on his mind. Or if he does, it’s crowded out by the 27 other ways he wants to get freaky at that same moment, some more successful than others, and none of them even remotely explained by any of the increasingly elaborate exposition dumps that pepper the route to an unnecessarily elongated shoot-out finale. Perverse Dr Moreau-style genetic experimentation, copious vomiting, the spewing of some sort of pregnancy-inducing ectoplasmic goop, not to mention ears that waggle uncannily, straggle-haired pheremonal teenagers, and a locale that is essentially a double whammy in incorporating both the classic Overlook-style remote mountain hotel and more than one nefarious-looking cabin-in-the-woods, “Cuckoo” has all of it, explains none of it and still somehow gets its has time to spend with König as he produces a little flute from his pocket and starts playing it like a latter-day Pied Piper.
To which we can only say: stay weird, man. The only thing to fear (aside from some resurrected mythic species being frankensteined into a family member at the whim of a rich German madman) is that when Singer’s inevitable call up to the Hollywood big leagues happens, he doesn’t go getting all sane. Part of the massive entertainment value of his wild and unwieldy second feature is that it is refreshingly free of any kind of manifesto, except perhaps in the vaguely anti-bioessentialist sense that when it comes to surviving a barrage of expertly retooled horror tropes, Dads are useless and Moms are unreliable, and the only things you can trust are little sisters, sexy lesbian strangers and your facility with a concealed blade.