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[Fantasia 2024]: Cuckoo

Writer's picture: Ygraine Hackett-CantabranaYgraine Hackett-Cantabrana

With it’s Montreal premiere happening at this year’s FANTASIA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL, director Tilman Singer’s Cuckoo is a psychological thriller that follows grieving teen Gretchen (Hunter Schaefer) as she relocates to a German holiday resort to live with her father and his family. 


Following a funeral, butterfly-knife wielding Gretchen joins her father Luis, stepmother Beth and non-verbal half sister Alma in the German Alps where Luis and Beth are helping to redesign a hotel owned by the eccentric Mr König (Dan Stevens). On her way home from a shift working at the hotel, Gretchen is pursued by a bizarre woman. And from this moment forth, she is haunted by strange occurrences that seem to centre around her family. 


Just like the offspring of the actual cuckoo bird, Gretchen is thrust into a family dynamic that she can’t quite seem to naturally fit into, with a dad who believes her to be suffering from psychosis and always feeling like she is second fiddle to her little sister, she has truly landed into a strange and alien environment, and that’s before the time loops, a screaming woman and random detective turn up. If all that’s not enough, in walks the cartoonishly sinister pipe-playing hotelier Herr König, played devilishly by Dans Stevens, who is firmly in his villain era right now. 


Cuckoo is truly a film that every horror convention has been thrown at in the hopes that at least one idea sticks, and despite Hunter Scahefer’s fantastic performance as a troubled final girl, the film suffers from its incoherency. From its Overlook Hotel-esque setting, glimpses of giallo and a villain which comes from the Josef Heiter (Human Centipede) school of villainy, it fails to bring together a cohesive landing, instead leaving viewers feeling stranded and dazed as credits roll. With more of a lean into the absurdity, and perhaps a complete adoption of the Italian 1970s murder mystery styling, it would have made for a more comprehensible and altogether more enjoyable cinematic experience.


2.5 screams out of 5

Opmerkingen


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