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Hunter Schafer makes for one hell of a final girl. With two black eyes and an arm braced in a cast, her feet laced up in combat boots and a butterfly knife tucked under her mattress, the Euphoria star picks up and makes off with Tilman Singer’s horror Cuckoo. She plays Gretchen – a morose teen relocated from America to a German alpine resort – as far more than purely determined and invulnerable. When she encounters monstrous, ravenous women who emerge from the woods outside the resort, she greets them with the wearied shrug of a 17-year-old kid who’s already taken a fair few knocks in life.
The resort’s owner, Herr König (an oddball Dan Stevens, once again rejecting the conventional handsome-man roles he seemed primed for after Downton Abbey), is fluent in ominous euphemisms. But Gretchen, without dropping a beat, will simply look at him and say, matter-of-factly: “That’s a f***ing weird way to put it.” It’s easy to root for her.
Cuckoo, admittedly, does need the kind of darkly comic clarity that Schafer and Stevens bring. Singer’s film – a starrier, English language follow-up to his creepy 2018 feature-length debut Luz – is potent and deeply emotional, but it doesn’t exactly come with handlebars. Its title hints at how its creatures operate, if you know a little about what these birds tend to do with their eggs. But that won’t explain the time loops Gretchen gets trapped in, shaking her brain like jelly, or the fact she’s not allowed in the hotel after 10pm because the female guests won’t stop vomiting in the lobby. It also doesn’t account for all the goo.
Cuckoo isn’t a horror movie for people who dislike unanswered questions, since Singer, who also wrote its script, is far more interested in emotional logic than the literal kind. The rumbling baseline of Simon Waskow’s score, and the clean but dated mid-century European style of the resort’s architecture, create a sterility that’s bound to drive an already distressed teenager, abruptly ejected from her home, to the point of frantic delusion.
We don’t immediately know the circumstances of Gretchen’s mother – Gretchen has relocated to live with her architect dad (Marton Csokas) – but they definitely aren’t good. Now Gretchen finds herself in the backseat of her emotionally absent father’s car, with his much younger wife (Jessica Henwick) who dresses like a Stepford wife, and their eight-year-old, non-verbal daughter Alma (Mila Lieu). Gretchen’s the one who’s been made to feel like, to borrow a piece of the film’s lingo, “a brood parasite” in her own life – an intrusion she had no choice over, in a country that’s not her own. When she ends up in hospital following an accident, her body a wreck, she begs her father to stay. He has the audacity to merely shrug and respond, “You’re making it very difficult for your sister.”
That’s the feeling of manic isolation that Cuckoo seems eager to capture. Singer shoots it all with a puppet master’s tightness of control, never pushing a single sequence too far, and leaving room for the monstrous chill of suggestion – encapsulated in an opening shot of a domestic dispute witnessed only as shadows on the stairwell wall. Schafer races through it all, eyes fixed firm on the horizon.
Dir: Tilman Singer. Starring: Hunter Schafer, Jan Bluthardt, Marton Csokas, Jessica Henwick, Dan Stevens. 15, 103 mins.
‘Cuckoo’ is in cinemas from 23 August
