102 min | R | August 9, 2024 | Neon
A teenager moves to a German Alps resort and discovers something profoundly wrong. Hunter Schafer anchors the dread. Dan Stevens goes full maniac. Tilman Singer makes horror weird again.
Gretchen is an American teenager forced to move to a resort in the German Alps with her father, his new wife, and her mute half-sister Alma. The resort is run by Herr König, a man whose hospitality has a clinical precision that is immediately unsettling. Strange things happen at night. Women vomit uncontrollably. Time loops. A figure in the darkness makes a sound that paralyzes anyone who hears it. The film reveals its mythology slowly and the reveals are genuinely bizarre. This is not conventional horror. This is something stranger.
Hunter Schafer plays Gretchen with a sullen teenage anger that becomes something fiercer when the horror starts. She is compelling in a role that demands both vulnerability and physicality. This is Schafer’s first major film role and she carries it. Dan Stevens plays Herr König with a politeness that never stops being threatening. He is having the time of his life in this role and it shows. Stevens commits to the absurdity with total conviction. Marton Csokas plays the father with oblivious compliance. Jessica Henwick appears in a role that connects to the larger mystery.
Tilman Singer directed Luz, a micro-budget German horror film that announced a distinctive voice. Cuckoo confirms it. Singer shoots the Alps with a beauty that makes the horror feel wrong in the right way. The sound design is the film’s secret weapon. The creature’s call is one of the most effective horror sounds in years. The chase sequences are tense and disorienting. The film’s visual language borrows from Giallo and body horror and nature documentaries in ways that should not cohere but do.
The film is defiantly uncommercial. The mythology will confuse audiences expecting straightforward scares. The pacing is deliberate. The answers raise more questions than they resolve. But Singer has a vision and Neon gave him the resources to realize it. The result is a horror film that feels genuinely new. In a genre drowning in sequels and remakes, that is worth celebrating.