Across 2024, Dan Stevens has been delivering performances that are increasingly… well, cuckoo. Whether dishing up gleefully gory carnage (and withering onion-based put-downs) in Abigail, or replacing kaiju canines as monster-dentist Trapper in Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, the former Downton heartthrob is in full embrace of the weird and wonderful. Offbeat horror Cuckoo continues that streak admirably. Here, he plays the seriously shifty Herr König, owner of a Bavarian holiday resort that simply emanates bad vibes. Whether menacingly invading people’s personal space (“Guten Tag!”), menacingly sniffing asparagus, or menacingly trilling a little wooden flute, it’s a delight to see Stevens in such playfully bonkers territory.
Except it’s only Hunter Schafer’s Gretchen (or, “Greht-yen”, as König pronounces it) who seems to clock how seriously off König is. In fact, the whole resort is odd. Guests keep throwing up. A weird signal is emitting from the nearby woods. A mysterious figure runs around in the dead of night. The Euphoria star carries Cuckoo brilliantly — convincing both as a disaffected teen and as a blood-soaked final girl when things go bird-shit crazy. She’s slouched and awkward, with a minimal tolerance for König’s strangeness, and an increasing frustration at her father’s inability to see it. Grieving the loss of her mother, Gretchen is reluctantly along for the ride in Germany, feeling displaced in her own family among her dad’s new wife Beth (Jessica Henwick) and their daughter Alma (Mila Lieu).
There’s a confidence to the filmmaking that promises great things to come from Tilman Singer.
While its two lead performances are pitch-perfect, Cuckoo’s script lets it down somewhat. Written and directed by German filmmaker Tilman Singer, it’s bursting with idiosyncratic characters and unusual beats, playing with micro time-loops and nightmare-logic editing — but when the time comes to peel back the film’s mysteries, it both over- and under-explains itself. Characters will exposition-dump at each other inelegantly, grinding proceedings to a halt — and yet, the intricacies of the resort’s secrets still raise considerable questions come the end credits. The more exposed Cuckoo’s foe becomes in the third act, the less scary things get. Keeping things more oblique would have been a bolder choice.
Because, elsewhere, the film is largely bold. It’s beautifully shot, with vivid off-kilter colours and a grainy, tactile texture courtesy of Paul Faltz’s 35mm photography. It has properly oozy deep-red fake blood, like the horror greats of old. It boasts burbling, cracking, creaking sound design to set you on edge. There’s a confidence to the filmmaking that promises great things to come from Tilman Singer. Just keep the deranged Dan Stevens performances dialled up, and tone down the cuckoo-splaining.