With a world premiere at the Berlinale in February, a full circuit of spring festivals, and a victory lap at Canada’s Fantasia Fest before its August theater release, it’s almost incredible that the resounding takeaway after six months of screenings is a simple question: what is Cuckoo about? 

Although Tilman Singer’s script works overtime in the department of not explaining its plot, what can be placed on solid ground is this: Gretchen (Hunter Schafer) is a teenager forced to move to an isolated resort alongside her father Luis (Martin Csokas), step-mother (Jessica Henwick), and younger step-sister Alma (Mila Lieu). In the wake of her mother’s death, Gretchen is reluctant to accept both the manufactured state of her family and the skip across the pond away from her childhood home. Greeted all too quickly and closely is the immediately unsettling resort owner and apparent architectural client of Luis, Herr Köning (Dan Stevens), who approaches the role with an invisibly threatening aura. If flying to the middle of nowhere Germany with your step-family immediately after attending your mother’s funeral wasn’t already hell on Earth, Mr. Köning’s flutist tendencies will certainly drag you down to Satan’s gates.

It becomes quickly apparent why the Luz director brought his sophomore effort to the audiences of Germany’s capital: the quiet countryside mountains of Singer’s home nation are the context for the Herr’s impending crimes. With an eerie temporal ambiguity and an intentional disconnect from the outside world, strange sensorial experiences and bloody chasedowns characterize Gretchen’s initial days. Despite the sequence of endangering metaphysical phenomena, she is the only family member raising a red flag.

Caught in the crosshairs of Singer’s cryptic mystery thriller is Euphoria‘s co-star turned last girl standing. From Jules to Gretchen, Schafer similarly anchors the film with a performance that oscillates between emotional vulnerability and steely determination to overcome the evils around her. Those evils, which methodically manifest around Mr. Köning’s obsession with manufacturing nature’s order of human conception (and Gretchen’s sister as the object of his fascination), make Singer’s narrative intentions more clear while the execution is blurred as the stakes are raised. Shifting gears toward the sub-genre of gyne-horror is a compelling premise. This narrative direction can be at its best when the foundational fear is losing agency over our bodies in service of those who seek control. The loose threads, convenient character entrances, and unfulfilled methodological logistics, however, are never fully realized, leaving the potential of its commentary on body politics fizzled out in an endoplasmatic puddle of missed opportunities.

In a post-Roe v. Wade world where female reproductive rights are a top-billed item on the tickets of a country’s foremost political figures, it would be hard to believe that a movie targeting similar themes could ever be as horrifying as reality itself. Despite this, Tilman Singer and crew attempt to assume the challenge. If female reproductive rights, access to legal and safe abortions, and the availability of IVF treatment options weren’t top of mind when developing the project, their hot-button nature for audiences receiving the film today cannot be ignored. Mr. Köning’s principal weapon, a woman fully brainwashed into the ambiguous scheme of impregnation and murder, induces a time-looping, vomit-activating hypnosis of her victims, Gretchen included. But as the scheme ramps up into the third act, not much is clear how any of this works or why. Overwrought feathered fauna analogies abound, and outside the display of skin-rattling sound design, the final showdown more than overstays its welcome.

Cuckoo materializes as a crazed collage of its more coherent precedents: the prescient body politics of David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers, the physical and intellectual isolation of Yorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth, and the nutty berserk motherhood of Zach Cregger’s Barbarian. While the unknown mechanics at times overshadow the narrative thrust of its first two acts, the known variables have enough style and substance to pique initial interest. Unfortunately, an awkward gap exists between its over-the-top silliness (see Herr’s commitment to his pronunciation of Gretchen) and its potential storytelling significance. Mr. Köning as a villain never possesses the determination or fortitude of Jeremy Irons’ Mantle twins, nor the reviling shock of Matthew Patrick Davis’ Mother. By the end, the question of what the film is about remains open. Despite a sharp lead performance and a beyond-cuckoo commitment from Dan Stevens, Cuckoo ultimately feels like a misfire–a body horror meditation that is too many steps behind the unfortunate frights of reproductive realities.

Review Courtesy of Danny Jarabek

Feature image credit to Fantasia Fest