Cuckoo Review: Hunter Schafer Headlines the Zany, Freak-out Sophomore Film from Tilman Singer

   September 18, 2024

Cuckoo Stars Hunter Schafer and is Directed by Tilman Singer

Review: There’s a lot to like with Tilman Singer’s sophomore movie Cuckoo, which balances sharp and eerie cinematography and sound design with a worthy physical and emotionally volatile performance from Hunter Schafer. Don’t hope to pull much of a sensical plot from this thing, because Singer’s made it clear he’s in it for surreal scares more than a cohesive story.

cuckoo 2024 movie
Hunter Schafer as Gretchen in Cuckoo (2024), directed by Tilman Singer

Cuckoo Review

Sometimes, a good ole freak-out film that doesn’t make much sense is exactly what you need. Fortunately, Tilman Singer is responsible for two of them now. 2020’s Luz was an underappreciated shock to the horror system that signaled Singer as an auteur to look out for moving forward, and 2024’s Cuckoo only further cements him as one of the genre’s bravest image makers, even as he’s working out the kinks in his storytelling repertoire.

And it helps to have a starry cast with a high Q rating headlined by Hunter Schafer. Schafer made a name for herself with HBO’s acclaimed Euphoria series, but her recent choices for acting projects in the film industry have been just as noteworthy, appearing as side characters in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes and Kinds of Kindness. She’s only now appearing as a main character for the first time in Cuckoo, establishing herself as a worthy scream queen in a movie that requires a heavy amount of physicality. Luckily, she’s up for the job.

Schafer plays Gretchen, a teenager reluctantly forced to move to the German Alps with her father (and his new family) following the death of Gretchen’s mom. Gretchen already hates her new living situation before she even sets foot in the new terrain, but things only get spookier when strange occurrences begin to compound. The eclectic cast of characters all hide secret motives and share a town’s past that threatens an outsider like Gretchen.

Cuckoo is a movie that only works because of the two-hander delivered by Tilman Singer as a director and Hunter Schafer as an actress. The film is largely style over substance, but the style is enough because the direction and cinematography is similarly on-point like Singer’s Luz was, and because Schafer serves as a remarkably succinct cypher into a world she finds as confusing as we do. It’s less about trying to understand how these townspeople live as it is just trying to escape with her life.

The movie also features Dan Stevens as a zany German doctor harboring much of the narrative’s backstory. His character operates more as a crucial puzzle piece to the plot more than a fully developed person, but Stevens is quippy enough to bring his character to life. He provides depth to the cast and allows it room to operate during the small portion of runtime that we aren’t following Gretchen.

There’s a lot to like with Tilman Singer’s sophomore movie Cuckoo, which balances sharp and eerie cinematography and sound design with a worthy physical and emotionally volatile performance from Hunter Schafer. Don’t hope to pull much of a sensical plot from this thing, because Singer’s made it clear he’s in it for surreal scares more than a cohesive story. It’s an indelible work that helps continue to carve him out as one of the horror genre’s more specific and idiosyncratic directors.

Score: 7/10

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