Written and Directed by Tilman Singer | 102 min | ▲▲▲▲△ | Amazon Prime

Though horror fans are probably going to remember the summer of 2024 for Longlegs, I’d urge any genre lovers looking for something particularly refreshing to check out this horror/sci-fi-/thriller from second-time, German feature filmmaker, Tilman Singer. Cuckoo is a singular joy. It’s nuttier than an Oh Henry, doesn’t make a lick of sense, but still manages to be wildly entertaining.

First off, let’s celebrate the fantastic Hunter Schafer. Following her cameo appearance in another twisted bit of moviemaking this summer, she’s primed for the kind of breakthroughs Anya Taylor-Joy and Maika Monroe have had before her, and I love the fact her being trans is simply a non-issue in this movie, which she’s said is what she wants.

Here she’s Gretchen, a 17-year-old whose mother has passed away in the States and so she’s come to live with her father, Luis (Marton Csokas), in Germany. He’s married to Beth (Jessica Henwick), and they have a daughter, Alma (Mila Lieu), who is deaf and suffers from something perhaps akin to childhood epilepsy. The family is moving into a mid-century modern glass box set near a resort run by Herr König (Dan Stevens, once again convincing as German) and conveniently for Alma adjacent to an advanced medical clinic.

Something weird is going on at this resort, but in her isolation from her father’s new family, only Gretchen (who seems to really resent her German name) seems to notice. When she lands a job at the front desk, Herr König insists she not ride her bike back to the house in the dark. What danger could she be in? Does it have something to do with the flute-like instrument Herr König plays toward the tree line, the female guests who vomit in the gift shop, or the terrifying blonde woman with the glowing red eyes out there in the woods, the one whose screeches seem to do strange things to people?

The answer is, undoubtably.

Full credit to the production design on this film — the sound editing, the cinematography, and especially the sets — everything has a fantastic, grainy 1970s feel to it, from the retro medical facilities to the wood paneled cottages to the vintage cars, even while cellphones are present and accounted for.

Moments of growing creep are aided and abetted by a jumpy hand in the edit suite — more than twice I suspected an interstitial scene had been removed as we leap ahead in the narrative and are forced to put together story beats and details left off-screen.

The slight confusion this causes in a viewer seems intentional, not the result of sloppiness, given how it adds to a dissociative feeling not unlike what some of the characters are going through. Cuckoo evokes early Cronenberg, Suspiria, and especially some of the weirder Michael Crichton films of the 1970s and ’80s — Looker, Coma, and The Terminal Man.

Also love to see Dan Stevens channelling Christoph Waltz-As-Bloefeld in his manner and accent, though he tips his hat as the villain pretty early on with that performance. Especially love that Cuckoo  is a movie where you’ll have no sense of its heading — the amalgam of genres means it could lean into any one of them at any moment. A dry undercurrent of humour and the outrageousness of plot developments in the last act, along with a surprisingly resilient set of both protagonists and antagonists, means Cuckoo threatens to break out as a full-on comedy, albeit a bloody one, at any moment.

That it doesn’t is largely due to Schafer’s earnest, exacting intensity. She keeps us rooted in her journey through all this weirdness, and reminds that if Cuckoo is actually about anything it’s in the connection between mothers, daughters, and sisters.