The Exquisite Eeriness of Bird Horrors Part III: 'Cuckoo' (2024)

Bringing my series to a close with Tilman Singer’s deliciously deranged horror mystery that caws its way inside your head

This is the final installment of a three-part series. Read the first and second entries here and here.

There’s a scene early on in Tilman Singer’s wacko horror Cuckoo where a woman guest randomly throws up in the lobby of a German resort hotel in the Bavarian Alps. And she’s not the only one. The receptionist chick casually reacts by saying, “This happens sometimes.” Why, how, or WTF would all be reasonable follow-ups from our 17-year-old protagonist, Gretchen (Hunter Schafer nailing her first lead role), but Bird Horrors tend to work in mysterious(ly messed-up and non-straightforward) ways.

It’s a vital element that makes or breaks this subgenre, and Singer has a knack for marrying the unknown with the unusual — weirdness is a great horror aphrodisiac.

Similarly to Lorcan Finnegan’s Vivarium, Cuckoo revels in sinister and slimy peculiarities (such as the one above) from the get-go. Yet, as opposed to that film’s thick obscurity, Singer’s script consistently throws in hints to provide a clutch for us to grab onto. He utilizes strange yet intriguing clues early on to establish an atmosphere both foreboding and eerie, creating an unsettling milieu that permeates every corner of this little European town. Whatever they might mean — or how they connect, attempting to make sense of an increasingly bonkers plot and a basket of eccentric characters — we have to work out ourselves. The pieces are all there.

There’s the human side: Gretchen mourns the recent loss of her mother while reluctantly moving with her father (Marton Csokas), his new partner Beth (Jessica Henwick), and mute stepsister Alma (Mila Lieu) to a new home in a foreign country. Clearly, she hates to be there and despises every minute spent with a family that constantly makes her feel redundant and unwanted. It’s not just her relatives, though: Herr König (Dan Stevens playing another villain with a 300-miles-per-hour intensity), the owner of the resort, slyly fuses every devious smile and smarmy sentence of his with an icky hostility toward her. He offers Gretchen a job at the reception because he wants her out of the way — or, at least, being monitored as much as possible.

König is a psychopath — and Singer makes sure we clock that from the first time we meet him — with some sort of grand plan that needs her gone. We soon learn she wants to run away, and he tries to speed that up as organically and quickly as possible. But his real reason only starts unfolding when Gretchen gets attacked by a hooded woman wearing a raincoat, a wig, and goggles in the middle of the night after her first shift.

The Deafening Caws of a Feral Momma Bird

Although Cuckoo leans heavily on Gretchen’s grief, accelerating anxiety, and growing loneliness to establish an emotional core (which is standard horror fare at this point), the film truly kicks into gear once the ominous lady appears. Her relatively early reveal is deliberate, as Singer told Variety, “I felt the closeness to this ghostly woman character was way more important than hiding her away.” Sure enough, from then on, the director slowly unleashes a mesmerizing madness that descends on us like a cloud filled with dismal dread and searing screams.

Drawing inspiration from classics like Dressed to Kill and Charade, Singer admittedly made his monster resemble someone from a bygone era to deepen its bizarreness and enigma. Combined with the avian characteristics — the thing never speaks but caws like a feral momma bird protecting her nestlings — the movie immediately lets us realize that she’s anything but human. Under the jacket and shades, there lies a beast disguised as a woman from the 70s with the ferocity and vileness of a rabid bird.

That’s a prime Bird Horror quality (as you probably figured), and things only get nastier moving forward. So, if you want to explore that yourself, this is the point where I should tell you to go watch it and come back to read later.

After the initial attack(s), we eventually learn that the “Hooded Woman” communicates through high-pitched shrieks, which can also paralyze humans and send them into a rippling time-loop where events keep repeating themselves for a few seconds. Singer employs these disorienting scenes with flair, effectively fattening up the mystery, which gets more hypnotic and offbeat with every forthcoming detail. The fun in Cuckoo lies in guessing and putting the pieces together to see what kind of phantasmagoria they’ll form in the end. It’s one of those horrors that becomes much clearer on a second watch because everything we need is there to solve the puzzle, but the writer-director doesn’t always spell it out for us what connects what.

Birds of a Feather

Unsurprisingly, Cuckoo has been called by critics a body horror, a trauma trip, and a thrilling genre exercise, but none of those really do justice to its main appeal. See, while many of its central themes — generational trauma, family structure, the circle of violence — fall short and come across as half-baked efforts at best, the dedicated focus on its mystery, exploring a humanoid cuckoo species, prevails as a bold and uncanny idea. It unfolds as a beautifully naturalistic yet perturbing fever dream manipulated by an obsessive madman ornithologist.

So, despite its shortcomings, I can’t really be mad at Cuckoo because it also offers something fascinating and original and follows through with it. If nothing else, that and the terrific main performances carry the movie confidently to its final conclusion. Perhaps it lacks that emotional punch it aims for in the finale (though your mileage may vary), but you can’t say it wasn’t a fervent and unexpected ride while it lasted. Of the three films I covered in this series, Cuckoo may be the most easily decipherable — but it’s also the one that classifies as an absolute blast if you’re open to its otherness. After all, birds of a feather flock together.

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I hope you enjoyed this series, even if it concluded much later than I initially planned. I might do something similarly theme-based in the future again. I've got some ideas already, but if you have a suggestion, shoot me a comment about it. As always, thanks for reading The Screen.