phancy.com - horror reviews - MOH 2024

Cuckoo



IMDb Info

Release Year: 2024
Runtime: 1h 42m
Country: Germany, USA
Language: English, German, French, ASL
Genre Tags: Horror, Thriller
Plot Summary: A 17-year-old girl is forced to move with her family to a resort where things are not what they seem.

Poster - Title Card


phancy.com rating:

phancy.com notes: A lot of stylish fun. Weird and creepy and European, set in a time and space that's simultaneously contemporary and stuck in the 70s. Starts off with the classic scenario of everyone acting oddly and gaslighting our protagonist when they call them on it, and then the conspiracy gets overtly sinister and violent. There's some light discussion to be had about families, biological or found or constructed, but the focus overall is thrills and chills.


Outside Reviews:

Christy Lemire
2 out of 4 stars - rogerebert.com

And yet, because she is grieving, we don’t know what’s real and what’s the manifestation of her trauma. The amorphous quality of her torment is sorrowful and unnerving, and the messages she leaves on her deceased mother’s answering machine never provide the catharsis she seeks. Schafer has such an accessibility about her that we feel every emotion, and as Gretchen taps into her fierceness, we root for her to use her physicality to triumph. She also has such a deadpan way of addressing the increasing absurdity around her that she brings some welcome comic relief within the tension.


Katie Rife
B- - Cuckoo's stylish horror might've been better if it'd made even less sense

But Gretchen keeps on pushing, building momentum to a finale that’s goopy and bizarre and blunt and kind of a letdown, given the mind-bending promise of everything that’s come before. Cuckoo ends up explaining itself a little too much, a throat-clearing impulse that leaves the film flailing as it battles competing desires to fuck with the audience and wrap up the story in a semi-coherent way. There’s just enough here to make it a satisfying watch for snobs and sickos, but it leaves more questions than it answers, in both good ways and bad. On the one hand, there’s nothing wrong with a good “WTF?” experience. On the other, Cuckoo sort of makes sense and sort of doesn’t, and these half measures almost make you long for something that makes no sense at all.