Watching Cuckoo as someone who grew up one country away from the Bavarian Alpine village this film is set in (and used to holiday in places that look pretty similar to it), I wondered how widely known cuckoo facts are outside the borders of Europe, especially as the American members of the family don't seem to necessarily share its most distinctive feature. Someone who doesn't go into the film and just based on the title can take a solid guess at what kind of horror will unfold maybe has a different experience of the denouement. I don't know when I was taught this, but definitely by the time I was in primary school I knew that cuckoos lay eggs in other birds' nests ("brood parasite" is the very effectively horrible actual term), and I think we were also communally told stories about adult birds then killing the competing baby birds of other species sharing that co-occupied the nest. If you were interested and fascinated by how the natural world sometimes comes up with nightmares that parallel those a gifted writer of horror may dream up, then this is definitely up there. German director Tilman Singer, who also wrote the script for this film, presumably had a similar schooling, and combines this bird trivia with a very topical (see also the double feature quality of The First Omen and Immaculate) anxiety about forced pregnancy and loss of bodily autonomy - the very contemporary way in which horror films digest reality post the Supreme Court's overruling of Roe v Wade.
I the context of these two horrors - the natural and the political - it's especially interesting to think about how the idea of "conservation" works: it is after all what conservatism claims to be all about. Conservation is what the movie's most clear-cut villain is after: the comically German Herr König (played by Dan Stevens, who is having a great run in horror film villainy), who runs a resort hotel in the Alps, has dedicated his life to the preservation of a species that just happens to be a highly effective predator of humans, and needs them for reproduction. The cost of his conservation process is the destruction of some of the human guests in the resort, and it is a price he is all too willing to pay. Under his guidance, the entire village infrastructure has been fine-tuned to serve this purpose: the local police man is in his pay to tie up loose ends, the local hospital specifically outfitted for the medical procedures necessary to facilitate the process, and document the results (something about the idea of institutions being co-opted in this way to serve a single, ideological purpose that callously harms humans feels like a very specific German anxiety).
Gretchen (played fantastically by Hunter Schafer) gets caught up in these machinations when her father (Marton Csokas, whose characters I disliked on sight because of the character he played in The Monkey's Mask many years ago, even though he is much more famous for Lord of the Rings), moves her and his disturbingly inappropriately young second wife Beth (Jessica Henwick, The Royal Hotel) along with their eight-year old daughter Alma (Mila Lieu) to a modern house near the resort. Luis and Beth are designing a new resort for Herr König, and they have been connected to him ever since spending their honey-moon there eight years ago. From the start, Gretchen is obviously an outsider in her father's new family: her step-mother is critical of her, her little sister doesn't speak (but seems eager for her presence), her father is aloof in a way reminiscent of other fathers who have made a new family and find the remnants of their old ones burdensome. Before things get weird in a more traditionally horror film way, Herr König is already a looming and disquieting presence, overly familiar, somehow always there even when it seems inappropriate, like his stake in this family is much higher than it should be if they were only acquaintances and business partners. Gretchen has a difficult time figuring out where the boundaries are: if this is just a weird Germanness she can't quite parse, or if something else is going on. The alienation of place translates perfectly into the resort hotel that Gretchen is soon tasked to work in: everything feels out of time, her use of a smartphone (mainly to listen to music and to leave messages to her mother that never receive a response...) in aesthetic conflict with the Eighties interiors and paper filing system. Tilman's deliberate use of architectural juxtaposition is particularly effective here: it serves to disorient and creates unease even before the monster makes its first appearance.
Hunter Schafer's physicality is the driving force behind the film: arriving in an unfamiliar place that she doesn't want to be in, she spends most of her time under big headphones listening to playlists, hunching her shoulders whenever she encounters new people, retreating into herself. It makes her look vulnerable, but there is also a level of prickliness that makes it immediately obvious when a situation or person makes her feel uncomfortable (which happens frequently). As the story escalates, she accrues injuries that limit her ability to move - first it just a head-wound from being chased on her bike on the dark mountain roads (Herr König's insistence that the dark isn't safe that she again can't quite parse as either inappropriate over-protectiveness, attempts to limit her freedom of movement, or admittance that something much more weird is going on, is the first sign that this is not a good or normal place), then a broken arm from a car accident when an escape attempt fails, and finally, after the epic battle at the end, a complete physical collapse (it reminded me of Angelina Jolie in Salt, or Charlize Theron in Atomic Blonde). Gretchen almost goes beyond being a classic horror movie final girl here and becomes, at time, a full-blown action hero, navigating her injuries and succeeding in spite of them. One of my favourite scenes is early on, when she encounters a new guest at the hotel reception and the prickly discomfort and stand-offishness turns into the charming and awkward stance of someone who is immediately and absolutely attracted to someone: Astrid Bergès-Frisbey's Ed offers a very short-lived, temporary reprieve, and an opportunity at escape that fails tragically (but it is the one connection that in the end opens the road to true liberation from all the horrors of the film, including that of her useless father).
The emotional core of the film is Gretchen's relationship with Alma, whose muteness is explained once the pieces fit together: She is the product of Herr König's breeding programme, in which female guests are unknowingly turned into carriers for the species he is trying to conserve. Gretchen starts off not even recognising Alma as a sister, in a stubborn attempt to protest her father's abandonment of his former family, and the horrors of now having to live with them in a strange place. But among all the people that are meant to care for her, especially in light of what the film eventually reveals is the death of her mother (hence the unanswered messages), Alma turns out to be the only one attempting to reach out, to ease her suffering, even though she is only a child, and not quite human. Gretchen, the outsider, realises that this non-human family is the truest one she has, and decides to save Alma from both Herr König and a discharged cop (Jan Bluthardt) with a personal stake's attempt to end the breeding programme. They escape this horrible fairy tale (Dan Stevens playing a flute to attract the monster like some even more twisted version of the Pied Piper of Hamelin is an image that will stay with me for a while), and drive off into the night, far away from the Alps.
2024, directed by Tilman Singer, starring Hunter Schafer, Jan Bluthardt, Marton Csokas, Jessica Henwick, Dan Stevens, Mila Lieu, Astrid Bergès-Frisbey.
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