Cuckoo 4K 2024

Grechen is 17 years old, and she finds it difficult to communicate with her father's new family and her 8-year-old stepsister. They arrive at a health resort, where Grechen sees a terrifying woman in dark glasses following her everywhere...

If birds were to choose a queen of horror, it would surely be the cuckoo - thanks to its antisocial behavior and synonymity with the word ‘madness’ in English, it often becomes a metaphor and even the title of thrillers and horror films - from ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest’ to the recent Spanish 'The Others: The Curse of the Cuckoo'.

And now there is a new cuckoo, this time with a German accent. I confess - I didn't understand anything. Perhaps if I watch the film again with a fresh mind, I will understand more, but unlike ‘The Soul Collector’ (where, by the way, cuckooing also plays an important role), I don't feel like rewatching ‘The Cuckoo’. It seemed to me that the authors were playing ‘David Lynch’, populating the space with strange and grotesque characters and setting them free (or laying eggs in other people's nests) and watching to see what would happen.

The result is a very strange and murky story about a teenage girl who suffers so many traumas and injuries (both physical and psychological) throughout the film that it constantly reminded me of Cronenberg's Crash. Out of some kind of fear, the parents (the father and his new wife), who came to treat their youngest daughter, send her to work at the hotel reception desk (which allows me to immediately add this film to two of my favorite categories: Scary Hospitals and Scary Hotels), even though she doesn't even know German. By the way, the language barrier is important to the story — the heroine is called either Gretchen or Gretchen, but all these Anglo-German details are lost in the dubbing. The hotel is run by Dan Stevens' character, who has been appearing frequently on screen (the new Godzilla vs. Kong, Abigail), and for some reason he wildly overacts (Lynch being Lynch!). He is opposed by a bearded detective, and their confrontation becomes grotesquely comical, culminating in a kind of Hot Shots-style meme.

The film is full of intriguing ideas: what happens to the characters? Can they really rewind time when they are stressed? Who is that creepy woman with glasses? What are the antagonist(s) trying to achieve?

I didn't get any answers, so for me the film fell apart into a series of frightening images - a shadow chasing a girl on a bicycle, cabinets in an archive falling like dominoes... Beautiful... but I want a coherent story. So I was left with the eternal question: cuckoo, cuckoo, how many scary movies do I have left?