Hunter Schafer rose to fame as Jules in the controversial HBO series Euphoria. Since the series began, the actress has finally secured her first leading role in a feature film after a supporting role in the current Hunger Games film The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes.
The horror thriller Cuckoo, which premiered at this year’s Berlinale, is now in cinemas. eerie tension and crazy surprises should not miss the work of the German director Tilman Singer about monstrous abysses in the Bavarian Alps.
Insider tip Cuckoo unfolds as a horror puzzle with lots of eerie tension
Singer’s film begins with a family trip, which has an ominous atmosphere from the very first scenes. 17-year-old Gretchen (Schafer) arrives at the Alpschatten holiday resort with her father (Marton Csokas), her stepmother (Jessica Henwick) and her sister (Mila Lieu) Alma. Here, her parents want to design new accommodation in the holiday complex together with the resort manager Mr. König (Dan Stevens).
Cuckoo holds back on concrete horror for a while and only scatters hints and puzzle pieces of horror, from which it is initially difficult to put together a picture. Gretchen and her family not only bring an unresolved trauma with them to the Bavarian holiday resort. The idyllic Alpine panorama also seems more and more eerie when the wind whistles through the trees and a sound constantly echoes, which like a female, animal scream in the head clings on.
Watch the German Cuckoo trailer here:
Cuckoo – Trailer (German) HD
And then there is the creepy resort manager Mr. König, who is played by Dan Stevens in a way that is far too friendly. The way he constantly and deliberately pronounces the American version of Gretchen’s name with the German sound is irritating. He hasn’t even picked up his flute yet, but you should see that for yourself.
For his second feature film after his graduation project at the Cologne Academy of Media Arts, Tilman Singer passionately layers horror elements on top of each other. Compared to the atmospheric genre exercise Luz, which ran for a crisp 70 minutes, Cuckoo the much more ambitious project, realized with visibly higher production values. Similar to his first film, the director’s influences are equally clearly visible here.
Horror cult director Dario Argento sends his regards in Cuckoo
The idiosyncratic, sometimes absurdly exaggerated atmosphere in Singer’s film is strongly reminiscent of the style of the Italian giallo and horror director Dario Argento. Anyone who has ever seen one of his films such as Suspiria or Profondo Rosso will be reminded of the inimitable mixture of artistic horror images and think of actions that are devoid of all logic and reality.
Argento’s Phenomena in particular seems like a relative of Cuckoo. In the 1985 film, Jennifer Connelly, as a young girl, ends up in a boarding school in the Swiss Alps where a serial killer is on the loose. This premise is accompanied by supernatural abilities, an eccentric entomologist and a scalpel-wielding monkey!
Watch a trailer for Argento’s Phenomena here:
Phenomena Movie – Trailer
Things aren’t quite that crazy in Cuckoo. The sometimes off-key dialogues and increasingly hair-raising escalating plot twists However, Singer also has Argento’s work in store. When the director plays with a little too open cards towards the end, drags out the showdown and tries to combine the bizarre with the emotional, Cuckoo becomes a little too overloaded and fragmented in comparison to the very dense Luz.
Hunter Schafer, who wields her butterfly knife with dogged resistance, still holds the film together as the most laid-back final girl in a long time. And the next time you hear a cuckoo calling from the forest, it certainly won’t be the usual one.
Cuckoo is now showing in German cinemas.