**/****
starring Hunter Schafer, Dan Stevens, Jessica Henwick, Márton Csókás
written and directed by Tilman Singer
by Walter Chaw For the most part, Cuckoo is the species of movie people who don’t like Yorgos Lanthimos accuse Yorgos Lanthimos of making. It’s a deadpan, mordant, deeply affected comedy of bad manners that distills human interactions to their component, lizard parts. In Cuckoo, marriage is merely a state-sanctioned reproductive arrangement designed to secure the reproductive potential of women; children are evolutionary guinea pigs for rogue geneticists; and love is a label for a biological reaction rather than a spiritual one. The picture’s main selling point, and what lends it depth, is star Hunter Schafer, fresh from HBO’s “Euphoria” and, from what I can tell, a capable and empathetic actor. But what serves this film particularly, perhaps cynically, is her identity as a prominent transgender activist. For me, a horror/sci-fi flick about a kind of human/cuckoo bird hybrid that, with the help of a secret cabal of mad scientists, implants their fetuses in the womb of unsuspecting hosts, is primed to be read as a trans parable. Being born in the wrong body? Feeling alien in one’s skin? Ostracized by family and dependent on doctors? I get it. Indeed, even in an age in which a woman’s reproductive choice is up for grabs again in the United States, seeing Cuckoo as a metaphor for the trans experience is the only way I could read it. I’m still trying to parse whether that’s to its benefit–because it gives it purposeful subtext–or an unfortunate distraction too unsubtle to be subtext, thus making the film feel didactic at best and like an exploitative vanity project at worst. Probably, it’s a “me” problem.
Schafer is Gretchen, an all-American kid whose mom recently died. She’s sent to Germany to live with her dad, Luis (Márton Csókás), stepmom, Beth (Jessica Henwick), and half-sister Alma (Mila Lieu). Upon arrival, she learns they’ll be spending a season at a ramshackle spa where Luis and Beth honeymooned eight years previous. It’s a working vacation, as Luis has been retained by the spa’s owner, Herr König (Dan Stevens), to do some renovations. If you’re now thinking of Verbinski’s A Cure for Wellness (or Skolimowski’s Deep End or Argento’s Phenomena or Fernando di Leo’s Slaughter Hotel), yeah, you ain’t far off. It does a lot of heavy lifting, this The Shining set-up, sowing its soil with metaphors for unresolved familial strife centred around, in particular, the introduction of a child that does not identify with how it’s been officially identified. Herr König marvels at one point how the humanoid cuckoo beast that lives in these parts is unlike its bird counterpart in that it is drawn back to its offspring at a certain point in the offspring’s gestation. This doesn’t bolster the film’s cryptid lore, though it does add a redemptive element to its trans parable: Past a certain age, maybe things get better. If this is its message, there’s a real danger of it being misinterpreted as “birds of a feather,” the positive read (being “seen” in greater society, given time) replaced with one suggesting it’s only ever possible to find acceptance amongst others of “your kind.” Little Alma, incidentally, is Asian, and I wonder if the casting isn’t an attempt to universalize Cuckoo‘s themes of alienation and identity dysphoria. If so, the effort is appreciated–even if making Alma incapable of speech plays into a familiar trope of the mystical, mute Oriental. Representation is a tricky thing: everyone has blind spots.
A centrepiece action sequence sees Gretchen pursued by a strange form (Kalin Morrow) in a trenchcoat while biking home after work. Director Tilman Singer couldn’t build the suspense better here, with Gretchen wearing headphones to block out the noise, the form beginning its pursuit well before she realizes her peril, and a shadow play happening beneath the evenly spaced streetlights that cleverly reports the closing distance between quarry and predator. The scene ends with Gretchen trapped between two panes of glass in emulation of another Dario Argento film, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. (If you’re going to steal, steal from the best and all that.) It’s a marvellous few minutes, as is a final battle culminating in a collapsing row of bookcases, but both feel airlifted in from a different film and narratively superfluous. I learned nothing about either Gretchen, save how well she can take punishment, or about the “form” chasing her, save how it has a unique, time-shifting superpower. Neither did I come away with a greater sense of the motivations driving them. As a Final Girl, Gretchen doesn’t seem particularly wise but, conversely, isn’t a virginal naïf: her climactic defense of her half-sister lacks the weight of a three-dimensional relationship, and so, too, does her victory, if one could call it that. It causes one to wonder, again, if her only qualification as the hero of this piece is the extratextual focus on her extratextual story of perseverance and success. Is the triumph of the film that Gretchen “rescues” Alma from a monstrous bird mother? Are we sure the mother is monstrous and not just maternal in a way that’s unacceptable to the “normies”? This is deep water I’m not equipped to navigate. I will say that the real risk of not being in control of your message is that at the end of all this Sturm und Drang, it’s possible that Cuckoo boils down to a white American woman going overseas to adopt a Chinese kid, which, I mean…c’mon, you guys.
