In her first lead movie role, the Euphoria star is a bloody believable heroine.
An American teen encounters peculiar horrors at a remote German resort in Tilman Singer’s Cuckoo, a kooky sci-fi genre hybrid that crackles with offbeat turns and creature scares as it unfolds against a backdrop of deceptively serene forests and cheeky Euro-kitsch.
Hunter Schafer (Euphoria) stars in her first lead film role as Gretchen, an angsty 17-year-old who’s been dragged halfway across the world to live with her father Luis (Kiwi star Marton Csokas) and stepmother Beth (Jessica Henwick) at the picturesque Resort Alpschatten. Judging from the decor, the mountain ski oasis hasn’t been updated in decades and Gretchen, naturally, is miserable on arrival, a fish out of water trapped in her own Alpine Twin Peaks nightmare – and that’s before things really start getting weird.
Gretchen is still grieving her mother’s recent death, and her relationship with her distracted dad is so strained that she’s counting down the days until she can fly the coop and return to the band she left behind in the States. It doesn’t help that Luis and Beth exclusively dote on their 8-year-old daughter Alma (Mila Lieu), who has a condition that prevents her from speaking and uses sign language to communicate, leaving the older girl on the outside looking in on her dad’s happy new life.
The domestic divide is clear as they arrive separately at their new home, Gretchen riding with the movers instead of in the family car. She’s toting so much teenage sturm und drang into her soon-to-be brat(wurst) summer, you forgive her for not clocking the red flags off the bat – even when the resort’s suspiciously friendly owner, Herr König (Dan Stevens), takes an intense interest in her, offering her a job at the hotel.
The unsuspecting family might not take note of all the warning bells but Singer, confidently directing his sophomore feature after buzzy 2019 debut Luz, makes sure we do. In one of his best sequences, orchestrated in thrilling fashion and with a sense of humour, a feral woman with red glowing eyes chases Gretchen on her bike ride home at night. Female guests are spontaneously vomiting throughout the hotel. Then there’s the inhuman shrieking that occasionally pierces the air, sending Alma into seizure-like palpitations and trapping Gretchen in a paralytic time loop as the film’s propulsive editing feeds us visions of a woman’s undulating throat emitting the earsplitting vibrations.
And why does Herr König keep a small wooden flute in his pocket, pulling it out every now and then to play a little ditty toward the distant tree line?
As she digs into the resort’s sinister secrets, Gretchen’s only allies are a hotel guest (Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey) with whom she sparks a flirtation and a harried detective (Jan Bluthardt) who recruits her into his investigation. Tracking the threats in plain sight is half the fun of Cuckoo, an eccentric blend of sci-fi, body horror and cosy Alps noir (shot on 35mm) that veers a smidgen out of control in its final plot-heavy stretch but doesn’t obscure its mysteries for long.
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Advertise with NZME.Credit a good chunk of Cuckoo’s delirious undercurrent of weird to Stevens’ performance as Herr König, the latest in a string of roles that eschew the British actor’s movie-star looks in favour of warped and wacky genre roles. The hospitable politesse displayed by Herr König, comically passive-aggressive with a lilting accent located somewhere in the key of Stevens’ Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga persona, hides a predatory intensity that grows increasingly unhinged as the film probes the reproductive horrors at its centre.
Yet even as the film lives up to its title, Schafer, alternately vulnerable and fierce, resentful and protective, counters Stevens’ antics with believable emotion while giving a physical performance that leaves her heroine increasingly battered and bleeding. Cuckoo, it turns out, is about human connection. Once the truth of its avian-like creatures is revealed, it’s the newfound sibling bond between Gretchen and Alma, forged in the wreckage of familial dysfunction and external saboteurs, that grounds the bizarre proceedings – and even stirs sympathy for its monsters.
‘Cuckoo’ is screening in New Zealand as part of the New Zealand International Film Festival on August 10 and August 13.
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