It will make you want to take your earbuds everywhere!

A family move to the German countryside as the parents work on designing a new resort. However their estranged teenage daughter starts to suspect not everything is as it appears.

Written and directed by Tilman Singer, and starring Hunter Schafer (The Hunger Games), Dan Stevens (The Guest), Marton Csokas (who has an uncanny resemblance to Clive Owen) and Jessica Henwick (Glass Onion) Cuckoo is a surprisingly engaging horror movie.

It follows the character of Gretchen, a teenage girl who would like to while away the hours practicing music for her band. Unfortunately, her father Luis (Csokas) and his new wife Beth (Henwick) and daughter, take her into the forested foothills of Germany. There, her parents will aid a resort owner (Stevens) plan out future construction plans. With little to do, Gretchen is offered a part time job at the nearby hotel, where she experiences some strange and alarming events.

Cuckoo has all the trappings of a classic horror movie. It has the family moving to a remote location. The family is struggling with past troubles. The action follows a young woman who sees what’s really going on, with no one else believing her. However, unlike hundreds of other movies of the genre, Cuckoo feels well-paced.
Initially, the film rides the audience’s expectations of strange things in the woods. But it doesn’t over do it. The screenplay doesn’t become stale with repetitive jump scare tactics or generic writing. It instead drops us into Gretchen’s moody isolation to break up the tension with distinct ennui.

The pacing ramps steadily upwards, with the second act being positively intriguing and horrifying. The screenplay dropping very clear hints that something is wrong. The resort has a large hospital nearby? A hospital for specifically treating diseases? There’s one particularly frightful scene, with Gretchen cycling in the dark, listening to music. Only her sweeping shadow on the road, cast by the streetlights betray something…

The title might baffle some, but in a lot of ways you should go into the film blind. Such is the way with many horror movies. Cuckoo‘s third act is wild. But in a lot of ways, more acceptable than the likes of Hereditary or The VVitch. Those films positively pitch-shift in their third act, becoming absurd and yet wishing to maintain their original earnestness. With Cuckoo, the film’s absurdity rises, only to be met with excellent character writing and levity coming with it.
That isn’t to say that Cuckoo is “witty”, it is quite a morose affair throughout. Gretchen’s homesickness is a central conflict, an absent mother being pivotal. But there is levity when required.

The central horror is creative, even though the premise is quite absurd. It reminds us of the seminal Japanese horror The Grudge (Ju On). Hunter Schafer is excellent as Gretchen, positively outshining everyone else (although Dan Stevens is also great) with a performance that is both brazen and yet vulnerable.

It isn’t often a horror movie actually works, at least for me. But Cuckoo is memorable, and very effective at what it does.