***Plot Summary:
Mourning the loss of her mother, Gretchen relocates to the German Alps with her father, Luis; stepmother, Beth; and mute half-sister, Alma. Her father is working on the construction of a new hotel there. Herr König, the eerie overseer, finds work for Gretchen at the hotel’s front desk. Not long into their move, strange things start happening: Alma experiences seizures that seem to be caused by a spectral shriek, while Gretchen comes across a hooded woman that the police dismiss as a prank.
She becomes acquainted with a detective named Henry, who is trying to solve a murder connected with the hooded woman. Gretchen also becomes fond of a guest at the hotel, named Ed, and together they plan to run away. In the wake of this, they are stuck in some kind of time loop, crashing their car, which leaves Gretchen hurt. While recovering, Henry reveals to her that the hooded woman is the murderer he is looking for and that she has something to do with Alma’s weird behavior.
Gretchen will learn that König and her father are mixed up in something even darker than she ever imagined. König reveals to her that Henry is a disgraced police officer, and the woman in a hood is part of a near-human brood parasite species, much like cuckoo birds. Their kind, like Alma, are put into human families until they are mature enough to join their brethren. Experiments to preserve this species have been carried out at the resort by König, so Gretchen is viewed as a threat.
König traps Gretchen and tries to have her inseminated by the teenage specimen of the species. Henry saves her by killing the creature. They rush to stop König’s staff from reuniting Alma with her real mother, the hooded woman. In desperation to save Alma, Gretchen kills Henry and faces off against the hooded woman, killing her.
In the end, Gretchen and Alma reconcile, then Alma uses her powerful shriek on both König and Henry to daze them long enough for the sisters to make their getaway. They are aided in their flight from the resort by an apparently healed Ed.
Reception:
Cuckoo had its world premiere at the 74th Berlin International Film Festival. It was released in Germany on August 8, 2024, while the U.S. release date was August 9. The film received mixed reviews with a respective 80% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a Metacritic score of 61.
Gretchen was powerfully played by Hunter Schafer, radiating vulnerability and paranoia as the character is pushed to the brink by a world that is slowly revealing its truly disturbing reality. Of course, Dan Stevens made a good impression as Herr König; he put threat and dark humor into the character.
The direction and cinematography of the film received accolades for its unnerving atmosphere, really nailing the feeling of being between worlds on such an isolated mountain. On the other hand, it is at times slow, with a very ambiguous resolution, and many of its viewers find the narrative confusing to follow, lacking in emotional deepening. Its genre blend of psychological horror and science fiction could become the movie’s one great strength or one enormous weakness: complex themes and slow-burning tension may not be to everyone’s taste.
Overall, this makes Cuckoo a movie that may, at best, gain some cult following for the marriage of horror and science fiction elements, even if not for everyone.
