Cuckoo

Cuckoo begins with an argument in muffled German. We witness it from the upper story of a suburban house, seeing the shadows of those involved moving on a wall. In a small bedroom, a teenage girl is also listening. We see her ears twitching dramatically in a nest of thick golden hair. Distressed, she gets up and runs out of the house, still in her pyjamas. It’s then that things get strange. Watching her go from an upstairs window, a male figure receives a warning: “The mother will be harder to control without a nestling around.”

Cut to another family, packed into a car. The light is colder, harder, a device often used to suggest a jump into the future. There’s an older girl with golden hair in the car, and you might wonder if she’s the same person. She certainly doesn’t seem uncomfortable with these people. It emerges that she’s not an adoptee, however, but a girl who is travelling with her father and his new wife and child. it’s a unit she doesn’t feel she belongs to, not least because, over time, it’s clear that her father always puts his younger daughter first. Nobody really seems to be looking out for the girl, Gretchen (Hunter Schafer), and as they are in the process of moving away from everybody else she knows, that makes her very vulnerable.

There’s plenty of dramatic potential here even before writer/director Tilman Singer starts to introduce the stranger elements hinted at in the prologue. The small Alpine town where the family settles, where Gretchen’s father is redesigning the local resort, is full of strange goings-on, but among the most immediately creepy aspects of it is the way everybody seems to think they can put their hands on Gretchen’s body without permission. It’s not overtly sexual but it’s controlling, deeply uncomfortable. When not touching, people stand too close. Later, when she’s really under threat, she will produce a little flick knife, but she holds it with such nervous uncertainty that one is reminded of the shot of the knife-wielding heroine towards the end of Rosemary’s Baby – it only makes her seem more vulnerable.

The story, as it develops, is both complex and meandering, full of peculiar characters and with multiple sources of threat. It’s Schafer’s performance that anchors it. Building on the work she did in The Hunger Games: The Ballad Of Songbirds & Snakes and, more recently, Yorgos Lanthimos’ Kinds Of Kindness, she creates a wiry, twitchy protagonist whose constant guardedness is balanced with enough intelligence and wit to win viewers to her side. The brief moments of happiness that Gretchen finds in music or flirting with a guest at the local resort are so intense that we can see there is real warmth to her, just beneath the surface. The ongoing fear she evinces after being attacked by a strange woman is a rare thing to encounter in cinema, and very human. What agency she has, she has to fight for, making it more meaningful.

Without giving too much away, there are two primary mechanisms through which the non-human dangers in the film are expressed. One is through the use of sound. This is carefully modulated to avoid causing auditory distress in viewers whilst still getting the point across. it’s unsettling and disturbing, as needed, but you’re unlikely to feel the need to plug your ears, even as characters do so. The other mechanism is the emergence of little time loops or interruptions to time perception and memory. Lasting only a few seconds each, these are effectively disorientating without becoming annoying, and characters’ evident awareness of them keeps them interesting at a dramatic level.

Despite this good work, the number of balls that writer/director Tilman Singer is trying to keep in the air here means that inevitably some are dropped. There is a stronger thread of logic running through it all than some critics seem to have appreciated, but it’s not surprising if people get confused. Fortunately, as its reception at the Fantasia International Film Festival established, it’s entertaining enough to get away with it.

There’s no shortage of energy here, even during the rather dragged-out climax, and Singer himself seems completely committed to it. Over the top performances from some cast members, most notably Dan Stevens as the resort’s owner, add to rather than detracting from the fun. The action scenes flow beautifully and everything looks good, no matter how odd it gets. Though it might have benefited from more disciplined development, Cuckoo is still a delightful, rare bird.