Essen. When the uncanny comes ever closer: Director Tilman Singer has made a sophisticated German horror film with “Cuckoo”.
This can’t be true! Gretchen, 17 and traumatized by an accident in which her mother died and she herself was seriously injured, is not very happy. Her father has just announced that he is moving to Germany, where he will move into a modern holiday home in the Bavarian Alps with his new wife and Gretchen’s mute half-sister Alma. The manager of the residential complex is a certain Mr. König, who offers Gretchen a job as a receptionist in his hotel, but also warns her not to go out alone after sunset.
Gretchen befriends an American tourist. And then she sees a scary woman in a hood for the first time. And what is the meaning of the bizarre noises that can be heard all of a sudden, and why do the last few minutes seem to repeat themselves over and over? And why does Mr. König (Dan Stevens in a controlled, over-the-top performance that is somewhere between trustworthy and psycho-killer) seem to have an increasingly evil influence?
“Cuckoo” is a clever film about fear
Western fear of forests and mountains, teenage angst at the end of puberty, brutalist inorganic architecture in the midst of a natural idyll and everything permeated by a feeling of chronic insecurity – after his fantastic thriller “Luz”, Tilman Singer has visibly matured as a director of the uncanny, when nasty noises, subtle terror, blossoming sexuality and finally open horror rain down on a Hunter Schafer who is as rebellious as he is handicapped by an injury. “Yes, this is a film about fear,” says the filmmaker, who was born in Leipzig in 1988, trained at the Cologne Academy of Media Arts and now lives in North Rhine-Westphalia.
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Singer directs with an eye on great role models, without being too obvious about Stanley Kubrick (“The Shining”) or Jacques Tourneur (“Cat People”), Ari Aster (“Midsommar”), Dario Argento (“Inferno”) or Tomas Alfredson (“Let the Right One In”). Singer’s credo is to cleverly vary genre cinema in its established rules and patterns. Ironic twists are not his thing and he clearly confirms this: “I hate it so much when people say don’t take it seriously, I don’t take it seriously either. Because then nobody takes anything seriously anymore.”
“Cuckoo” in the cinema: Tilman Singer creates wonderfully disturbing moments
Given this, Singer manages to create wonderfully disturbing moments with a nighttime bike ride and a chase in a hospital that leads to increasingly cramped spaces. His script can’t quite keep up. The clearer the horror becomes, the more the narrative loses its density. What counts here is the design quality, the visual condensation of the emotional amplitudes. And anyway, it’s only Singer’s second film.
