Horror film with Hunter Schafer: Surreal trip: »It’s bad. I want to go home”

The 17-year-old American Gretchen (Hunter Schafer) comes to Europe after the death of her mother to go to a resort somewhere in the Bavarian Alps with her father, his new wife and her little half-sister, the mute Alma (Mila Lieu). to live with the descriptive name “Alpshadow”.

The parents are supposed to design this newly built resort, so the “Alpshadow” is supposed to be Gretchen’s new home. In “Cuckoo”, his second feature film after “Luz”, director Tilman Singer is obviously less concerned with telling a plausible story than with following his leading actress every step of the way on a surreal and absurd horror trip while creating an atmosphere to create something that is as unpleasant and difficult to understand for the viewer as it is for its leading actress.

Hunter Schafer portrays Gretchen very convincingly as a suspicious teenager who is overwhelmed by the rituals, unwritten rules, conventions and invisible dependencies of adults.

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“Cuckoo” is particularly stringent in its setting, which makes the world, from the perspective of the teenager Gretchen, appear to be a nightmare populated by ridiculously blasé adults and otherwise a nightmare consisting of family problems, fear, curiosity and awakening desire – in other words, like the usual teenager -Hell.

Immediately after arriving at the resort, Gretchen is surrounded by the host Mr. König (Dan Stevens), who introduces her to the head of a “medical department” without missing the opportunity to touch her. Singer shows these touches up close – and soon King offers the teenager a job at the reception, which she accepts. Hunter Schafer portrays Gretchen very convincingly as a suspicious teenager who is overwhelmed by the rituals, unwritten rules, conventions and invisible dependencies of adults. She leaves her dead mother heartbreaking messages on the answering machine, which is still active, in which she laments her suffering, her fears and her homesickness: “It’s bad. I want to go home.”

Singer shows us the world around Gretchen as a constant threat and initially doesn’t make much of a difference between the hotel manager’s touches, the terrible adult small talk, the parents’ expectations and a monster woman who begins to persecute them. Naturally, nobody initially believes Gretchen when she tells her about the latter.

The situation in which the person who first notices that something is wrong is labeled as crazy or crazy by those around them is not uncommon in horror films. Here she not only refers to the different perceptions of those involved, but also to the fact that the adult world, in which the father does not notice that his daughters are apparently victims of inexplicable violence, and in which Mr. König’s strange and suspicious behavior does not irritate anyone, is already sick in itself.

For Gretchen there is only one way out of this hell, namely when a woman, Ed, also a guest at the hotel, shows up with whom she suddenly begins a sexual affair. We see the two kiss and then take off in Ed’s car. However, they don’t get far and are soon overtaken by Gretchen’s pursuer.

The way out is therefore linked to (same-sex) desire and Singer motivates the lustful escape from the sick world of adults not as primarily rational, but as a stark emotional contradiction. While women in the hotel world are constantly vomiting and writhing in pain, Ed and Gretchen’s bodies become relaxed, optimistic and excited as they flee (also with the help of joints). We see Gretchen in this sequence for the only time in the film shine.

But escaping the horror is not that easy. Gretchen’s sinister pursuer uses her hypnotic super scream, which even rewinds time by a few seconds, and gets the two of them into an accident. As she reaches for the main character who is trapped in the car, we hear a gunshot. Gretchen wakes up badly battered in Doctor König’s hospital. Since she is now completely at his mercy, she inevitably begins, as is usual for the genre, to empower herself, to move from passivity to the offensive.

Together with a helper, the police officer Lando, she finds out where the female monsters come from and what that has to do with the hotel, the king and Alma. Meanwhile, the film becomes increasingly allegorical. King turns out to be a crazy “species conservationist” who wants to help “nature” get its due by ensuring the preservation of monster people. It is no coincidence that König’s over-the-top homeland and nature ideology is suggested, it is no coincidence that the action takes place in the Bavarian Alps, and it is no coincidence that many shots of Singer’s images are reminiscent of the homeland film aesthetic with which post-National Socialist Germany assured itself.

The whole thing culminates in a scene in which Gretchen, the lesbian young woman, when she has actually already escaped the worst, cannot find the way out that is actually free and needs the help of her little sister and her still innocent, uncorrupted intuition.

The film apparently takes place in the early 80s, at least that’s what the corded telephones and cars suggest. The hotel reception and lobby, for example, are modeled down to the smallest detail on the style that hotel designers at the time assumed would radiate coziness and a welcoming culture. And while he inevitably escalates the horror in these incredibly beautiful images, “Cuckoo” shows the fight of a young woman against a man with a natural-ideological, patriarchal God complex as an inevitable and brutal battle for the whole thing.

»Cuckoo«: Germany, USA 2024. Director and screenplay: Tilman Singer. Starring: Hunter Schafer, Dan Stevens, Jessica Henwick. 102 minutes, start: August 29th.

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