This article appeared in the August 16, 2024 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Cuckoo (Tilman Singer, 2024)

In 1963, when asked to elucidate the message behind The Birds, Alfred Hitchcock offered a tidy response: “Nature can be awful rough on you. If you play around with it.” This doomy logic is what catapults science-fiction and eco-horror plots into action—intervening in nature inevitably invites corporeal retribution, which necessitates further human intervention. This is also the M.O. of Tilman Singer’s sophomore feature, Cuckoo, in which a family takes up residence at a German Alps resort that is gradually revealed to be a site of subhuman experimentation.

Gretchen (Hunter Schafer, in her first leading film role) is a sulky teenager who reluctantly leaves her life in America to join her father Luis (Márton Csókás), his second wife Beth (Jessica Henwick), and their mute daughter Alma (Mila Lieu) at Alpschatten, the sleek mountain resort where the couple honeymooned a decade prior, and which Luis has since helped redesign. Alpschatten is uniformly abject and nondescript: a hotel and health spa hedged by deep forests, just down the hill from an ominous “Chronic Disease Center.” Upon their arrival, the group is welcomed by Herr König (Dan Stevens), the conspicuously shady, madcap resort owner who shuttles them to an ultramodern house and begins to take an overt interest in young Alma.

Gretchen takes up post as a hotel receptionist, and soon observes strange behaviors on the premises: zombified guests vomiting in the lobby (“This happens sometimes,” another receptionist tells her) and a periodic screech emanating from the woods, which causes disorientation and violent seizures among the clientele. Cycling home one night, she is chased and clawed at by a feral woman—a warped Hitchcockian blonde in sunglasses, a headscarf, and a trench coat. Gretchen seeks refuge at a nearby hospital, where she is placed under the care of the unabashedly corrupt Dr. Bonomo (Proschat Madani). In a Buñuelian turn, Gretchen is unable to escape the resort grounds for the rest of the film, succumbing to the dizzying bird cry every time she is on the cusp of fleeing. The screech involves an irritating bit of cinematic repetition: shots of a human throat’s quickening pulse, meant to mimic a bird’s gular fluttering. Each birdcall also presages another of Gretchen’s multiplying contusions, as every new cast or bandage is made into a running gag about how much a depressive 17-year-old girl can physically take.

Singer’s debut feature, Luz (2018), about a bloodied young cab driver fleeing a possessed woman, is likewise thematically concerned with seizures and mysterious afflictions. But Luz maintains a singular, relentless momentum, while Cuckoo’s many horror tropes (convulsing bodies, public puking, medical malpractice, gangly figures running amok) overwhelm before the resort’s dark secret is even revealed: the institute is impregnating humans with hybridized DNA to create bird-humanoids, a grotesque play on the cuckoo bird’s habit of abandoning eggs in the nests of other birds, to be raised as their own. As König declares, it is a “quest for preservation,” though he never specifies whose conservation they are really after. Where Cuckoo might have been an interesting fable about paranoia, hybridity, and “playing around with nature”—potentially earning its place in the bird-horror canon—its tongue-in-cheek approach and onslaught of hokey villains and plot twists is an unfortunate departure from the grimy tone of Singer’s more focused first film. (Lucile Hadžihalilović’s 2015 feature Evolution also offers a better instance of committing to a grotesque insemination plot.)

Singer’s direction squashes the film’s brief but effective scares with a stagy, smug sense of irony—communicated in large part by Stevens’s high-flown mad scientist: he stares into the distance while delivering his foul plot with a comically stilted German accent. Schafer, by contrast, plays the Final Girl with striking authority. Her story presents twin loops of grief and institutional violence—of dislocation from her mother (who is conspicuously unreachable, possibly dead) and maltreatment by her father. Gretchen, as a figurative orphan, is portrayed earnestly and realistically, and her attempts to place herself in the world and play havoc with the institute seem to exist on a different plane from König’s swollen villain.

Cuckoo never clears the bars set by its inspirations, matching neither the ostentatious scenarios of giallo nor the steadily increasing tension of a John Carpenter film. Singer borrows from Dario Argento and Mario Bava in the gorier scenes, which admittedly have some flourish—a critical image being the blonde bird-woman offering handfuls of her spew to seizure victims. But unlike the films of those Italian masters, which pathologize victims and villains alike, Cuckoo never moves beyond the shock value of its premise of ornithological gene-splicing. The film’s array of villains quickly becomes impossible to keep up with, each tangled in the convoluted nest of ideas on display—too many birds in the aviary.

Saffron Maeve is a Toronto-based critic and film programmer.