A Bird in the Hand

Film: Cuckoo
Format: Streaming video from Hulu Plus on Fire!

There are times when I’m not sure what to think about a movie going in. Cuckoo is such a film. This is a movie with a positive review score from critics and a negative review score from viewers on Rotten Tomatoes, and it’s below the 3.0 Mendoza line on Letterboxd. But, while that’s true, I heard a lot good about it. It’s a real part of my life now that I find it almost impossible to talk movies with a lot of other people. Most of the time, they have no idea what the movies are that I’m talking about. “What the hell is Cuckoo?” I hear 99% of the people I know in real life saying.

Gretchen (Hunter Schafer) has just lost her mother, and as a teen, cannot really be alone, so she is forced to move to Bavaria with her father Luis (Marton Csokas), hrer stepmother Beth (Jessica Henwick), and their daughter Alma (Mila Lieu), who is mute. The family has arrived there to help build a new hotel, which is run by a man named König (Dan Stevens). Needing something to do, Gretchen takes a job at the front desk, but strange things start happening immediately, including women wandering around half-clothed, multiple female guests vomiting, Alma suffering a seizure that appeared to be triggered by a strange noise, and more. Most terrifying, one night riding her bike home, Gretchen is pursued by a woman wearing a hood, an event that is passed off as a prank by the local police.

But there is definitely something amiss in the area. A local police detective named Henry (Jan Bluthardt) is investigating a murder that appears to be connected to the woman who gave chase to Gretchen. Unhappy with the way her life is going and suddenly worried about her own safety, Gretchen decides to flee the Bavarian Alps with a guest named Ed (Astrid Bergès-Frisbey), but the sudden appearance of the hooded woman causes the car to crash. Gretchen is seriously injured in the crash, and is now trapped in Bavaria with things getting stranger and stranger, and all of it seems to come back to the mysterious woman in the hood.

All of this is a nice build up to a mystery, but once Gretchen awakens in the hospital, things start to go completely off the rails. It soon becomes evident that the woman in the hood is not only perpetrating attacks on women in the area, but that they are very disturbing. It also becomes increasingly evident that Gretchen might not have a lot of people around her that she can trust.

Cuckoo has a few spots of mild gross out horror, but it’s not at all focused on grossing out the audience. The goal of this is instead to produce a profound sense of disturbance in the audience and it succeeds at this well. That said, and while this does eventually get to a really interesting and surprising place, the way that the film works on the audience does feel a little bit lazy. Make something a little scary and a lot confusing and you’re going to have your audience off-balance. That’s really what a good percentage of the audience is looking for already—they want to be surprised and confused. Part of the effectiveness of the horror comes from the fact that we don’t know what is happening or what is going to happen next.

For all of this, Cuckoo is pretty disappointing in a lot of respects. Confusing is often effective, and I like where this eventually lands, especially because where it lands explains the title of the film. It simply felt like it was odd for the sake of being odd, though, and there are similar movies that I feel like have done a lot of this plot a lot better. I think Hatching was a more successful film, and I liked that one only a little.

Cuckoo isn’t a complete failure. There are some really scary moments, and the hooded woman is genuinely pretty terrifying in places. This is a film that I think would have been better if it had felt less like a fever dream, though. The surreality is a part of the “lore” that is being created, but it’s not something that works for me in this case.

Why to watch Cuckoo: It’s the kind of unhinged that we all need in a horror movie.
Why not to watch: If you know anything about birds, you’ll guess the secret.