What is this Movie?

After the death of her mother, 17-year-old Gretchen moves from America to the German Alps with her father Luis, stepmother Beth, and mute half-sister Alma.  Gretchen isn’t very thrilled at her current situation feeling like the 3rd wheel in her new family, butting heads with her stepmother, harboring jealousy towards her younger half-sister, and feeling ignored and resented by her own father.  She’s offered a job by the local hotel manager Herr Konig, where things start to get a bit loopy.  Half-dressed women randomly showing up in the hotel lobby drinking sprite and vomiting, a beady, red-eyed hooded woman chasing her through the night dressed like she fell out of a Hitchcock film, and Alma randomly having seizures all give Gretchen the impression that Herr Konig isn’t just a hotel manager, and she might need to get the hell out of town before it literally kills her.

What is this Film?

Cuckoo is absolutely cuckoo.  From the moment this family shows up in the Bavarian Alps, you get why Gretchen looks like she’s being dragged here against her will.  Hunter Schafer pretty much carries this film until Dan Stevens fully shows up in the 3rd act, outside of a few creepy moments shared between he and Hunter earlier in the film.  You have this young girl who’s now forced to live in this foreign land, where one minute people are speaking German, and the next they’re speaking French.  The hotel she works at closes at 10PM for reasons no one wants to explain.  She’s constantly passing out in one place, then waking up in a totally different place.  This part could just be the editing and not necessarily indicative of her circumstance.  Aside from hotel guests, nobody in this town feels trustworthy.  Then there’s the old woman from Birds in a raincoat with the hood up and not a drop of rain in site that keeps chasing Gretchen all over town.  Multiple times she’s nearly killed, and her father could careless, even going as far as telling her go on ahead and get if she’s not happy there and wants to leave so damn bad. 

Then the late-night screeching starts.  Is that a banshee?  There’s a damn banshee in this movie!  This wild feral sound causes the audience to experience déjà vu in reverberation hell.  I thought my screener was fried or bootlegged.  It took 3 of these scenes before I realized the editing was done this way on purpose to disassociate the audience from time and reality.  The beauty here is while you’re experiencing these loops along with the characters on screen, you see them start to realize the déjà vu around the same time you’ve realized it and some of them know what this means.  Others aren’t so lucky.  The monster here is so menacing you just can’t turn your eyes away from the screen.  Add to that this was shot in 35mm film giving you that nostalgic late 70’s horror cinema where creepy things are way creepier and loud noises feel way louder, and you’ve got one of those horror films you start to resent watching alone.  This is definitely some bring a friend horror.

The story isn’t overbearing or too complex once you get deep into the 3rd act and Herr Konig is given more exposition.  But That still won’t keep you from either needing to watch this multiple times or at best rewinding it over and over again creating your own loops to help put the dark pieces together.  Not being able to figure out what the hell was going on is what made this movie so good to me.  I found myself at the climax of this film stumbling over the sense I couldn’t make of any of it and asking things like, “Wait that creature thing is a what?”, “These scientists are trying to do what with it?”, and my favorite “So is that person dead now?? 

Another film about women being sacrificed in the name of science and experimentation, I’m kind of starting to hate being a man.  And this one has a such a weird twist.  I finished it and started thinking we just might need to ban men from doing science stuff.  Mostly because we’re just terrible human beings.  But also because mother nature has to be sick of our shi..nanigans. By the end, you’ll either find it uncomfortably interesting, shamefully wishing you could see more to answer all the questions you’re left unanswered, or you’ll absolutely hate it for leaving you feeling cuckoo.

Streaming now on Youtube, Apple TV, FandangoAtHome, Amazon Video, etc

♦♦

Director: Tilman Singer

Starring: Hunter Schafer, Jessica Henwick, Dan Stevens, Marton Csokas, Jan Bluthardt, Mile Lieu

Synopsis: A 17 year old girl struggles to survive an evil creature and uncover the truth about sinister things happening to her and her family after they move to a resort in a small German town. 

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