‘Cuckoo’ Review: The Alps Have Eyes

The first shot after the opening titles of Tilman Singer’s savvily conceived but undercooked Cuckoo is like a reverse angle of the opening shot of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Here, a family drives through beautiful but implicitly foreboding mountainous terrain. And we’re located in the cab of the car with Gretchen (Hunter Schafer), an angsty teen who’s been forced to relocate from her home in the U.S. to a relatively remote corner of the Bavarian Alps.

Steep, imposingly snow-capped, and dotted with romantic castles and high-end ski lodges, the Bavarian Alps are tourist magnets, and justifiably so. But this part of Germany was also a favorite of Hitler’s, and today it’s the heart of traditional conservativism in the country. Like Appalachia in the U.S., it’s a place a horror movie might take us to in search of scary people—except here the eyes in the hills are more likely to belong to upper-class entrepreneurs in precisely tailored suits than they are to uncivilized brutes left behind by modernity.

Such is the cultural background of Singer’s film, which casts British actor Dan Stevens (whose A-level German has already been exhibited in such films as I’m Your Man) as one such dubious, aristocratic hill-person. His character, known only as Herr König, has invited Gretchen’s family to stay for an indeterminate time at his Alpine resort. Gretchen’s father, Luis (Marton Csokas), and stepmother, Beth (Jessica Henwick), both architects, have been contracted to design and build König’s next touristic undertaking, so it seems the family could be there a while.

There is, of course, some kind of ulterior motive to the invitation, as hinted at by the strange, unofficial restrictions that König suggests for Gretchen once she’s settled in and taken a job at the front desk. Gretchen bristles against the very idea of the move. She’s recently left her mother’s house and is visibly resentful of her stepmother and, at times, her stepsister, Alma (Mila Lieu). She accepts the receptionist job out of a desperation to escape the comfortable but alienating conditions of her father’s successful marriage and professional life, only to find herself increasingly drawn into the weird goings-on under Herr König’s watch.

Women staying in the resort’s bridal suite have a tendency to wander into the hotel lounge, dazed and stilted, before abruptly vomiting. “Oh yeah, that happens sometimes,” Gretchen’s co-worker, Beatrix (Greta Fernández), casually says when our protagonist first witnesses this occurrence. And then there are the weird episodes that Gretchen has been having, in which she seems to be caught in a time loop of sorts, the same moment repeating over and over again while the image we’re watching suggests film coming loose in a projector’s gate.

It’s such effects, rather than the unrolling mystery, that lends Cuckoo a sense of life in its first half. From the start, it’s as clear to Gretchen as it is to us that something untoward and dark is up with Herr König and, indeed, the whole community around him. It’s almost as if she’s seen as many horror movies as we have. The only question is what, exactly, the secret is, and what it has to do with the woman in a white coat and sunglasses who stalks the forest at night.

Clues are planted both by a prologue and by the film’s title—ones that are clear enough that an intrepid viewer might guess and initially dismiss as ludicrous the final reveal that comes about two thirds into Cuckoo. Here, Singer’s apparent desire to toy with the dark side of symbols of Bavarianness takes over from the sense that horror movies are most effective when they’re either scary or shocking. From that point, you may wish that the absurdity of the conceit had been matched by a bit more irreverence in the script and audacity in the imagery.

Rather than prestige imitation-shlock, a film that coins the term “homo cuculidae” would seem to call out for the eye of an exploitation master, a Stuart Gordon-type who might give the audience something they can laugh at but which might still haunt their dreams. Instead, unable to commit to either realism or absurdity, Cuckoo largely fails to live up to the promise of its title.