‘Cuckoo’ Review: Hunter Schafer takes on Dan Stevens in Tone Shifting Horror/Thriller Set in the German Alps | Berlinale 2024

We’ve all been eager to see Hunter Schafer in her first film role as a leading lady and now that the wait is over… we want more! Ever since the making of Cuckoo hit the news, there was no doubt this would be a rather peculiar project. A sophomore film for a young German director, Tilman Singer, whose genre film Luz played in Berlinale 2018, with both German and American backing, as well as the NEON stamp of approval sounds like an easy sell. The least we can expect from Cuckoo is to deliver a passable psychological horror/thriller set in the Bavarian Alps and to certainly make good use of Schafer as an antsy, grieving seventeen year old, but the biggest surprise here lies elsewhere. 

Despite the film’s messiness, Singer manages to utilize classical genre tropes well enough to deliver a fascinating watch, while also highlighting how uncanny Germanness already is. Coming from him, a Leipzig-born, Berlin-based filmmaker, it’s a real smart decision to situate the film in an isolated mountain resort, to give Schafer’s character a name with dual pronunciation (Gret-chen in German or Gre(t)chen in English), and of course, to pair her with the ever-fantastic Dan Stevens as the most German of villains, Mr. König.

The moment when Gretchen steps out of the car (reluctantly), we can sense something’s not right. She’s been forced to fly across the Atlantic to move in with her father, his new wife, and their daughter Alma (Mila Lieu) after the death of her mother back home and the world visibly weighs down on her. But when the owner of the estate, Mr. König, takes a liking to her and offers her a receptionist job, Gretchen sees this as an opportunity to save money and make a run for it. From its very beginning, Cuckoo is more a story about escaping than a coming of age parable. 

By the time it gets to its titular metaphor, the film has already left you enough clues to figure it out—experiments, women missing, couples honeymoon suite, a strange hooded woman making bird noises at night—but even if you have no trouble connecting the bird which lays eggs in other birds’ nests to the eerie happenings at the resort, Cuckoo ends up concealing more than it reveals. And we’re here for it. What makes the film special is not its twisted plot, nor its well-timed jump scares, it is the chemistry between protagonist and antagonist, and, frankly, the tonal incommensurability in their performances. Schafer is an unappreciated gem when it comes to comedic shifts, bringing a kind of Gen Z honesty to the tensest moments that can channel the audience’s suspense into laughter so effortlessly that one can take the catharsis for granted. With a single gesture or a line delivery, she can poke fun at Mr. König’s overly theatrical behavior and language, and their good versus evil fight looks more like a dance between two styles of acting.

One cannot praise Schafer enough for a role that necessitates a move from emotional curtness to vulnerability (especially towards her half-sister) alongside that of physical debilitation. Gretchen not only suffers a car accident, she’s also beaten, bruised, battered, and shot at (it’s the hyperbolized violence that saves the scenes from being child cruelty), and the actress’ face does not flinch: in fact, this role bodes so well for Schafer that her action-thriller pipeline is all we can think about now. On the other hand, Stevens is suitably impenetrable for a ‘mad scientist’ kind of character, but he can also have fun with subverting the stereotype. His thick German accent is as exaggerated as his sleaziness to an effect that’s both comic and utterly terrifying. 

Surprisingly, these shifts in tone really fit Cuckoo and one can even say they make it an all-rounder film: the horror fans will enjoy the way it builds up fear and suspense, the thrill-seekers will appreciate its convoluted central premise, those who want to be entertained will be treated to unforgettable one-liners (“I was supposed to fertilize that egg!”), and the theorists will find the treatment of bioengineering and hybridity fascinating. 

While a spoiler-free review of this film would only skirt around its most adventurous parts, Cuckoo does manage to keep it all together. It may be a mess, but a wonderful one nonetheless: it seems so unlikely that a film like this could exist as it does now that it’s reason enough to celebrate. Who needs a fully-fledged dystopia, when you can have a potentially-matriarchal-but-maybe-not version of it led by two magnetic performances that strangely seem to belong together? Move away, Euphoria, it’s Cuckoo’s time to shine.

Grade: B

This review is from the 74th Berlin Film Festival where Cuckoo world premiered in the Berlinale Special Gala section. NEON will next bring Cuckoo to the SXSW Film Festival in March and release it in the U.S. on May 3, 2024.