Check Out Any Time You Like: Josh Pearce and Arley Sorg Discuss Cuckoo

Cuckoo is an indie horror creature feature, relying heavily on its isolated location and small cast to effectively create an atmosphere of paranoia and dread. A teenager named Gretchen (Hunter Schafer) moves to a German mountain resort town with her father, stepmother, and stepsister where she meets an eclectic collection of characters—including the owner of the hotel, Herr König; a physician at the nearby hospital, Dr. Bonomo; several half-dressed, vomiting women; Henry, who claims to be a detective; and a hooded woman running around the woods at night.

Gretchen’s plan to run away with a hotel guest is interrupted when the creature in the woods attacks. Injured and with no way to leave, Gretchen increasingly realizes that whatever it is that’s out there, it’s targeting women, and it’s being helped by people at the resort.

Arley: This one really is more fun if you know little to nothing about it. I kind of recommend people just skip the review and go see it. We can’t help but give certain things away, but we both enjoyed it! It’s not perfect… we each had our quibbles, but we both thought it was an interesting, creative film, in a sea of derivative movies, sequels, and remakes! Okay, so? Go ahead!

Josh: The creature is basically a woman in a wig, which okay cool, she looked creepy. It seemed a bit like an X-Files monster-of-the-week, which is not necessarily a bad thing, this technique of taking this weird creature and making it look human, and just applying another creature’s aspects and attributes to it. Like X-Files did with a flukeworm, or a lizard, or a giant bat. It seemed like a “we don’t have a budget for creature effects” scenario, so they’re just gonna look human, but they do weird shit. That can be effective if you write it well, it doesn’t matter what it looks like. It can be creepy anyway.

Arley: But even when you see the monster close up, it still looks creepy. They did a really good job of developing that sense of the monster’s ability to fuck you up.

Josh: Yeah, because she just popped out of nowhere and no one had any defense other than, I guess, plugging their ears, which took them a long time to figure out. Anyway, I’m not going to go too deep into what this creature is or what it does, because that would take away most of the movie. I’m not gonna highly recommend this movie, but I think I would still recommend it. Give it a go.

Arley: Yeah, I feel the same way. Recommend it as different, and effective in a lot of ways. There are storytelling details I wasn’t sold on. But I still think it’s a really cool movie.

Lower-budget horror movies are experiencing a recent resurgence, with this year alone offering such titles as Abigail, I Saw the TV Glow, Late Night with the Devil, and Longlegs. Much of that is thanks to independent production and distribution companies like Neon and A24, whose films make creative choices to tell interesting stories with limited resources. Horror movies of the ’70s and ’80s were often made on the fringes of the film industry and, without big studio interference or interest, were free to experiment with weird shit. That tradition is going strong today, with higher production values.

Cuckoo executes simple techniques to great effect. There’s one scene filmed at night in which Gretchen rides a bicycle through alternating areas of darkness and streetlight, and the camera is set up over her shoulder so that the viewer can’t see what’s behind her, but you can see the shadows. Even when you know what’s coming, it creates tension and fear. Another inventive technique is used to produce disorientation not only in the characters, but in the audience as well, leaving us unsure if the film is glitching or if it’s supposed to be that way, and wondering what exactly is going on.

Arley: I really appreciated how they focused on an atmosphere of dread and just the sense that something is off. I enjoyed how 99% of the characters were at least a little bit creepy, so you didn’t know who to trust. Even the family members were assholes and you’re never 100% trusting anyone except for the protagonist.

Josh: Well, even then I was like, “What is her problem?” sometimes.

Arley: The overall feeling, the look, it was definitely Euro indie horror vibes. There were some callbacks to old school horror that I had mixed feelings about, because it occasionally felt a little bit Rocky Horror Picture Show, which I don’t think was the intent. When a character explains what the creature is, for example. There are just these moments that are very ’60s horror, and they seemed disjointed with the modernity of the rest of the movie.

Josh: Dan Stevens as Herr König was certainly hamming it up in his scenes. He was trying really hard with that German accent.

Arley: At the end I was thinking, I don’t know if this whole story is plausible? And it goes back to what we say about time travel stories—the more you explain shit, the less it starts to make sense, and so maybe just don’t explain. I liked the things they didn’t explain, which I think worked brilliantly, but later, when they overexplain everything else, it takes me out of that mood. Some of the moments of highest shock, when they first happen, you’re like, “Wait, I don’t understand.” And they let you sit in that confusion for a bit, while giving you enough story to keep going and trust that it’ll all lead somewhere.

Josh: I certainly felt that there were some logic holes in the concept. Maybe it was consistent if you wrote it all down on a page, but I don’t think it entirely carried over to the screen. The rules were a little hodgepodge, or seemed arbitrary.

Arley: I just thought that it’s rare that I feel the atmosphere and vibes land as well as they did in this movie. Even if I wasn’t sure that the whole monster idea and all of the pieces were quite plausible, it’s still fresh and innovative and new. And I appreciated that.

Horror obviously doesn’t need to make perfect sense in order to get the job done, and Cuckoo‘s main strength is its Lynchian accumulation of weird happenings, as though Gretchen was working at a hotel in Twin Peaks or found herself in Welcome to Night Vale—she’s not unaware of the uncanny, and walks straight into sketchy situations like a character going down, alone, into a dark basement.

But where else can she go? We’re in a place where everything is weird. This is just where we live now.

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Written and directed by: Tilman Singer

Starring: Hunter Schafer, Jan Bluthardt, Márton Csókás, Jessica Henwick, Dan Stevens, Mila Lieu, Greta Fernández, Proschat Madani, Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey, Konrad Singer & Kalin Morrow

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