Cuckoo, by Tilman Singer. The review

There is a particular feeling, which alters time and location in space Cuckoosecond film by Tilman Singer, winner of the Silver Crow at the Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival. It is that sense of bewilderment that immediately assails the protagonist Gretchen – Hunter Schafer, known for Euphoria -, forced to leave behind her life with her mother to start over with her father, stepmother and stepsister who is starting to show the first symptoms of epilepsy, all in the off-centre setting of a resort in the German Alps. A place of regeneration, made of open spaces and the owner’s obsessively kind ways, but in which strange interstitial presences seem to operate, events always on the threshold that divides restlessness from bizarreness.

On the other hand, the figure that interests Singer is evidently that of displacement, articulated through the hybrid formula of the para-science fiction thriller that becomes a ghost story, somewhere between the grotesque and horror. Thus, if the presences that agitate the resort appear picturesque, the action is nevertheless felt and the rhythm is tense as in the best tradition of the genre. In between there are small temporal shifts, given both by the lightning-fast flashbacks to the trauma buried in the girl’s past, and in the loops created by the presences, which define the obsessive and repetitive figure of their fury. But above all there is an altered relationship with nature, an omnipresent force in the isolated environment among the mountains and from which the truth about the mysterious figures themselves descends, halfway between hidden folklore and the laboratory experiment hatched with arrogance and naturally escaped by hand. The “Cuckoo” of the title thus echoes both the mechanism of a spring clock that repeats its winding “in a loop” and the bizarre figure of these bird-humans.

Singer underlines the perceptive mismatch through a staging that has the warmth of the Eighties, with loaded and deliberately false backdrops like the always very emphatic acting of most of the cast and guesses some key sequences – such as the shadow of the presence that is revealed in the game of see/not see among the lights of the forest, masterful! The management of human dramas appears more fluctuating: if the hard-boiled figure

guaranteed by the policeman who is trying to shed light on the mysteries of the place appears somewhat out of place, and the protagonist’s character arc turns out to be the source of numerous episodic situations that are often not punctually connected to each other, Hunter Schafer’s dedication to the role is magnetic and recalls the AnnaLynne McCord by Excision, in a mixture of fragility and restlessness, as if Gretchen herself were one of the interstitial, vaguely Lynchian presences of the context. She is echoed by Dan Stevens’ Konig, in which the larger-than-life roles with Adam Wingard are revisited in filigree, which give the character a repressed aggression and destined to find her explosion in the finale.

In this way, Cuckoo among the numerous detours, it manages to keep curiosity and interest alive until the end: it won’t be the horror of the back shelves (as per James Wan’s brilliant definition for his Malignant on films that base their greatest appeal on displacement) but certainly the confirmation of an author who wants to play with genre conventions in a captivating way.