Hello owl hello
Although he never appears on screen, it is obviously the cuckoo who is at the center of the story, as the title of the film subtly indicates. The cuckoo is a species of bird which has the particularity of lay its eggs incognito in the nest of other birds and take flightso that his young ones may be brought up in the sight of others besides him. Often large, the cuckoo chick will tend to clear the nest (and therefore kill) the other chicks to be he alone fed by the parents who were victims of the deception.
The whole challenge of the film is to try to transpose this horrible mechanism onto human characters, an idea that came to Tilman Singer while watching an animal documentary. And it took time for the German director, already author of the horror film Luzto bring this project to fruition, announced in 2021.
And Hunter Schafer has always been committed to the project (which must have been delayed after his recruitment for Euphoria), the cast was initially supposed to also include John Malkovich and Sofia Boutella. Both actors had to withdraw over time, leaving room for Dan Stevens (who fought to convince the director that he could take on the role of John Malkovich, even though he was much younger) and Àstrid Bergès- Frisbee. The film loses nothing, as each actor shines in his role.
Special mention, obviously, to Hunter Schafer who had not yet had a leading role in a feature film to express all his talent, and to Dan Stevens, who confirms more than ever his love of crazy roles and his ease with them.
You have to know how to cut
With these assets under arm, Cuckoo immerses its viewer in an offbeat universe that could be a modern version of the Great Northern Hotel in Twin Peaks. A seemingly charming hotel, with rustic and warm touches, but where nothing seems to work exactly as elsewhere and where everyone seems a little crazy. The benchmarks of normality are gradually being lostuntil things get a lot crazier, and that’s what we like.
Yet, Cuckoo is far from perfect. By dint of taking care of its atmosphere and its characters, the film sometimes forgets to tell a story that standsor even who is interested. The random rhythm of the narration causes some delays, and the Machiavellian plan behind all the ambient weirdness turns out to be convoluted, not very coherent and ultimately less interesting than the more secondary aspects of the film.
Tilman Singer is reluctant to make horror too horrific and delights in his Lynchian in-betweenwhich is sometimes a shame since the scariest passages are undoubtedly the most successful of the filmand the viewer might wish there were (much) more.
We think in particular of the best visual idea in the filmwhich emerges in a scene where the heroine is cycling at night, lit occasionally by streetlights on the side of the road. As each lamp post passes, her shadow also passes by her, projected onto the asphalt. Until the moment when another shadow, threatening, is added to his own and makes her understand that she is being pursued in silence. A very simple but devilishly effective idea, which sums up Singer’s talent in directing.
A film in the coup
In the rest of the film, the director will skillfully play perspectives to torturing its executives and spatializationand create suspense that is sometimes truly gripping. It’s a shame, perhaps, that the most fantastic appearances in the film, superb in themselves, clash so much with the rest of the story and sometimes act more like timid haunted house puppets rather than main and very real threat of the plot.
Rest of Cuckoo a real piece of strange pleasure which delivers, in addition to its beautiful moments of tension and the delectable performance of its actors (we always want more Dan Stevens, half-sweet, half-completely crazy), a moving story about grief and sisterhood. A nice festival revelation which would have deserved to be more than that, and which gives hope that Tilman Singer will quickly return behind the camera.
