By Nicole Veneto

Cuckoo bridges the experiences of cis and trans women together with overlapping concerns about how our bodily autonomy is increasingly controlled by patriarchal forces.

Cuckoo, directed by Tilman Singer. Screening at Kendall Square Cinema, Coolidge Corner Theatre, AMC Boston Common 19, and Alamo Drafthouse Boston.

Hunter Schafer fights a blood battle against an avian menace in Tilman Singer’s Cuckoo. Photo: NEON

There’s a lot of symbolic and associative weight to be found in the cuckoo bird. Most know them as the little guys who emerge from German-made clocks every hour on the hour, signifying time and repetition. When a cartoon character is hit by a mallet, if the birds flying around their head aren’t tweeting a generic bird cry, they’re chirping “cuckoo” to denote disorientation. The crazed Sonny the Cuckoo Bird has been “cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs” since 1962. As a brood parasite, the cuckoo lays its eggs in the nests of other birds, whose are left to raise their young, providing the root word for the terms “cuckoldry” and its diminutive “cuck.” Birds in general carry a privileged resonance in storytelling: to be a “caged bird” or in a “gilded cage” signifies entrapment. The titular talking raven in Poe’s poem taunts the protagonists’ loss of his beloved Lenore by mimicking “Nevermore.” Horror cinema holds birds in high regard, thanks in no small part to Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, a film which provocateur theorist Camille Paglia interprets as an allegory for the captivity and domestication of women’s sexual power.

All of these themes and signifiers peck their way into Tilman Singer’s Cuckoo, the other hot new summer horror offering from NEON. The follow-up to Singer’s enigmatic 35 mm debut Luz, Cuckoo resembles the sort of bonkers art house Euro horror you’d expect of Dario Argento’s ’80s output. In place of Phenomena’s young Jennifer Connelly — telepathically communicating with insects to assist in a murder investigation — Cuckoo finds Euphoria star Hunter Schafer menaced by an avian-human hybrid in a bloody battle of nature vs. nurture. Unlike the slow-burner ambiance of Longlegs, Tilman’s latest seeks to thrill and confound at every opportunity. The result seems to be rather polarizing for critics and audiences alike. It immediately became one of my favorite horror movies of 2024.

After the death of her mother, seventeen year-old Gretchen (Schafer) finds herself the black sheep in her father Luis’ (Marton Csokas) perfect new family. He and his beautiful young wife Beth (Jessica Henwick, The Matrix Resurrections) have whisked Gretchen and their mute daughter Alma (Mila Lieu) away to live in Germany’s Bavarian Alps while they design a new hotel for unnerving resort owner Herr König (Dan Stevens and his scary blue Husky eyes). To mitigate Gretchen’s discomfort with her new surroundings, König offers her a front desk job triaging hotel customers. Almost immediately, Gretchen finds herself at the center of several strange occurrences. Women in the lobby are prone to vomiting, and a shrieking warble from the woods causes epileptic seizures in Alma (to say nothing of the temporal distortions it causes to those who hear it). And then there’s the mysterious Hooded Woman (Kalin Morrow, dressed not unlike Tippi Hedren in The Birds) who chases Gretchen down on her bike in the middle of the night. Though the police consider it to be a prank, local detective Henry (Jan Bluthardt, Luz) is convinced there’s a connection to his ongoing murder investigation. Together, the two begin to unravel a horrible conspiracy involving a race of avian-human “cuckoos” impregnating unsuspecting female hosts in the area.

None of the elements that make up Cuckoo are particularly new or innovative, but Singer executes them with such stylish confidence that the formulaic aspects of the plot fall to the wayside. To dismiss this film as a “mess” (as I’ve seen many do) overlooks just how mindfully Singer ties his thematic and symbolic associations into the story’s stylistic details. Like Argento’s Phenomena, Cuckoo operates through sheer fairy tale logic. This is reflected in the anachronisms that make up the film’s setting and production design. Despite the presence of iPhones and modern medical technology, the resort and its ephemera are caught in a time loop. Cassette tapes, analog televisions, and that horrid orange-brown color scheme: so much of the interior design creates a feeling of being outside of time and space, an approach not unlike David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows. Singer’s trying to knock you off your game as much as possible. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the sound design. Sound is an integral but often forgotten component to horror cinema. Cuckoo’s overwhelming earfulls work in tandem with its bird-related themes. (Side note: it’s been pointed out online that the end credits list “AI audio effects,” although the software appears to have been used to modulate vocals and sound recorded specifically for the film.)

What really anchors Cuckoo through all the chaos is Schafer’s performance, marking her first starring role in a movie after supporting turns in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes and Kinds of Kindness. She is hyper-resilient in the face of avian mayhem; her survival depends on a butterfly knife and a surplus of teen angst. She becomes gradually worse for wear throughout the course of the movie: maimed, bruised, and broken, whether by the Hooded Woman or the challenge presented by glass doors. (I’m convinced Singer found those old Windex commercials a gas.) Schafer’s pivot into Scream Queen territory is a natural fit, but what’s especially transformative about her role is that she’s one of the few cases of what Caden Mark Gardner and Willow Catelyn Maclay call “trans-as-cis” casting. Gretchen is inferred as cisgender by the plot, yet Schafer’s transness adds a meta-textual layer to Cuckoo’s thematic resonances. In effect, Cuckoo bridges the experiences of cis and trans women together with overlapping concerns about how our bodily autonomy is increasingly controlled by patriarchal forces, be it by a scenery-chewing Dan Stevens and his Pied Piper flute or legislation against reproductive rights and trans health care.

It wouldn’t be the first time that I’ve gone against critical consensus in seeing something in a movie others haven’t. Whereas Longlegs took a second viewing to appreciate and MaXXXine underwhelmed me with its reluctance to bring what I loved about the series full circle, I was perfectly attuned to Cuckoo’s calls. Hopefully this marks the start of a lucrative film career for Schafer, be it as the next Final Girl or in more enigmatic projects such as this. Either way, I’ve gone a bit cuckoo for Cuckoo myself.

Nicole Veneto graduated from Brandeis University with an MA in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, concentrating on feminist media studies. Her writing has been featured in MAI Feminism & Visual Culture, Film Matters Magazine, and Boston University’s Hoochie Reader. She’s the co-host of the podcast Marvelous! Or, the Death of Cinema. You can follow her on Letterboxd and her podcast on Twitter @MarvelousDeath.