Cuckoo: Movie Review

Cast: Hunter Schaefer, Dan Stevens, Marton Csokas, Jessica Henwick
Director: Tilman Singer

Euphoria star Hunter Schaefer is Gretchen, a teenager dumped with her father, his new partner and step-sibling in this unusual horror set in the Bavarian Alps.

Dragged into a resort to live and work (under the guidance of a suitably unctuous Herr Koenig, played by Dan Stevens), Gretchen soon finds her world plagued by strange goings on.

To reveal much about Cuckoo - even plot basics - is to rob the audience of what Singer is trying to do here, with a film that revels in its strangeness and its unsettling atmosphere that channels European 70s stylings with a sense of dread.

Schaefer is eminently watchable throughout this slice of deranged horror, but even though Stevens is having a good time, and there are a few effective scares that are more than the usual cheap jump efforts, a lot of Cuckoo feels like it's not quite chosen to lean fully into its B-movie horror sensibilities.

Granted the hidden in the hills in isolation setting recalls The Shining, but the central mystery of Cuckoo, while solid, is never really sensational enough to qualify and quantify audience investment.

Consequently, the film's central explanation for loops, unsettling edges and general weirdness, feels a little too unsatisfying to justify. And certainly the film's final act feels like a garbled mess of exposition mixed with heavy gunplay.

Thankfully, Schaefer, Stevens and Csokas prove more than watchable enough in this horror as it unfurls to justify the time spent within. With some touches that feel distinctively new (a bike sequence being chief among those), there's enough to allow Singer another go-around in the genre, but any future films from the writer / director will need to feel a little sharper to fully pierce their target.

This film is playing as part of the 2024 Whanau Marama New Zealand International Film Festival. For more details, visit nziff.co.nz