Tilman Singer’s “Cuckoo” isn’t coherent, like, at all, but it has the emotional pulse that has eluded recent horror films like “MaXXXine” and “Longlegs.” It’s the kind of movie that you root for, and, despite my many reservations, I came away admiring it. The convoluted set-up takes getting used to though.
In the opening scenes, Luis (Marton Csokas) and Beth (Jessica Henwick) and their daughter Alma (Mila Lieu) arrive at a resort in the Bavarian Alps with Luis’ teenage daughter from a prior marriage, Gretchen (Hunter Schafer). It takes the movie at least 15 minutes to offer that information up straightforwardly, but the confusion is resonant: Luis, Beth, and Alma arrive in one car, while Gretchen follows behind in a truck. Gretchen is immediately established as an outsider, someone who feels like an interloper in her own family. And Luis and Beth don’t disagree.
Before the metaphorical monster reveals itself, there are the shenanigans in the creepy resort that are obligatory to the genre. Rumors of patients disappearing, weird sounds and the like, and Singer proves to have a flair for atmosphere. A weird warbling that makes people’s ears move, before distorting time, is especially creepy even if it’s eventually revealed to be beside the point. Also on hand is a mad scientist, Herr König, who is played by Dan Stevens in another of his eccentric freak-show performances that suggests the second coming of Peter Lorre. When I think Germans in horror movies I think Nazis, which Singer anticipates. It’s all part of his mind-bogglingly stacked deck.
The evil scheme of the resort and the nature of the monster wreaking havoc are so wonderfully bizarre that I don’t wish to interfere with the surprise. What’s going on here has the haunting irrationality of a nightmare. One hint: the title of the movie is more literal than you think it is. Another hint: the monster complements Gretchen’s sense that she has been relocated to the wrong home with the wrong parent.
The relationship between Luis and Gretchen is pitilessly stark. He openly favors his new family over the child of the woman who’s now dead. Alma has issues that will eventually be explained by the big conspiracy, which will link her at least thematically with Gretchen, and Luis is more concerned with Alma’s problems than with Gretchen’s escalating endangerment by the mystery monster.
Gretchen and Alma’s kinship is the film’s heart, as they are each imprinted via the trauma of a disrupted mother-daughter bond. That’s the idealistic way to read this material, which steers “Cuckoo” into the familial agony of David Cronenberg’s “The Brood,” a film that is visually quoted here. One understands Singer’s fealty to “The Brood:” it’s personal and relentlessly precise, a wrenching masterpiece of the genre.
By contrast, “Cuckoo” isn’t precise at all. It is positively lousy with mixed implications, in fact, and a less idealistic way to read some of this material is as an expression of anxiety over people of differing ethnicities uniting and raising families. Beth and Alma appear to be Asian, while Luis and Gretchen are European. On its own, so what, but the film becomes dependent on Alma’s “otherness,” including her inability to speak, which is literalized by the nature of the monster and its plan, which involves leaving children with parents who aren’t theirs. Keep in mind I also said something about a guy at the resort who suggests a Nazi, and he of course has a role in the calamities that ensue. I’m not sure if the Nazi who’s not a Nazi proves or disproves any of this conjecture.
For the record, I think that this racial anxiety arises accidentally, as a side effect of Singer’s empathetic concern with medical violation and the erosion of women’s reproductive rights. In other words, Singer’s feminism somewhere along the way gets into a traffic jam with color-blind casting and various other horror-movie tropes, resulting in potentially crass optics. What intentionally matters here is the possibility of raw and visceral familial rejection and/or fraud in terms of your biological identity, which potentially equates here to destiny. I feel myself, as I rewrite this graph again, still getting lost in the circuitry of this film’s indecipherable subtext.
What’s this movie like from scene to scene, Chuck, for people who aren’t critics or English majors? It’s a creepy horror mystery with a poignant and soulful performance by Schaffer and two or three big scenes that deliver the meat-and-potatoes thrills of a horror movie. That’s what you need to know above all. You should enjoy yourself, and find that “Cuckoo” sticks to the ribs better than many other recent horror pictures. Well, that, and that the movie is nuts and takes risks. It doesn’t hide behind its references, and Singer clearly has a great movie in him once he settles down.
Catherine Breillat’s “Last Summer” is another perverse mining of a child’s fears of replacement by his family, though in this case dread mixes with fantasy. The situation here is eerily similar to the initial set-up of “Cuckoo,” involving a prosperous European man, Pierre (Oliver Rabourdin), who has remarried, to Anne (Léa Drucker), and adopted Asian children, Serena and Angela (Serena Hu and Angela Chen). Pierre would rather forget about his teenage son from a prior marriage, Théo (Samuel Bircher), but he is stuck with him one summer after the boy gets in trouble at school.
Paring the 2019 Danish film “Queen of Hearts” down to its foundation, Breillat springs a masterfully subtle thriller, coaxing out your complicity with everyone on the screen at once. Théo acts out at Pierre and Anne’s home as he has elsewhere, and Pierre recedes into the pressures of his tedious bureaucratic job while Anne is stuck reigning in Théo’s impulses. It turns out that Anne and Théo have something in common: they both resent Pierre. And from this commonality springs an affair between a 17-year-old boy and his middle-aged stepmother.
We’re talking the classic older woman-younger man scenario, then: the springboard for sex fantasies in mainstream cinema and porn alike. Breillat is resolutely uninterested in celebrating how Anne gets her groove back, or in how Théo discovers the joys in sex with an experienced woman. Breillat isn’t even interested in scoring points on poor fuddy-duddy Pierre. He is boring, and you see why Anne is frustrated with him, but Breillat sees his pain as well. What does interest the director is power, and how it manifests from every angle of a situation that most artists are more than happy to trivialize.
“Last Summer” unfolds with a hushed, tightly-coiled sense of docu-dramatic intensity. There is no score, and scenes tend to unfold in long, unrushed, mesmerizing takes. Breillat has a way of guiding your eye towards pertinent details without you being aware of her technique: the grasp of an arm, a lean in towards someone’s face that’s a little too close. Breillat allows you to notice Anne in a trim, sexy dress casually, as your eyes might dart over someone attractive at a party. Each detail builds on top of another to show how the erotic bond between Anne and Théo coalesces.
This technique leads the audience on a discomfiting journey. The intimacy of the scenes between Anne and Théo is erotic. They are also creepy, because Breillat doesn’t cheat like so many filmmakers working with this situation do: Théo isn’t played by an actor pushing 30, allowing us to distance ourselves from the practical and moral implications of a fantasy. Bircher was 18 when he shot this film, and Breillat refuses to allow you to forget that Théo is a boy. But she also refuses to cast judgment on Anne’s actions. Breillat’s control over this film and its implications shows most erotic thrillers up as the kids’ stuff that they are. Breillat is an uncompromising cucumber, an adult who insists on treating you like one. Tired of dumb summer movies? Here’s a tonic.
What I’ve described so far would be more than enough for most sexually-themed films. Breillat goes further. The film’s opening scene establishes that Anne is an attorney representing victims of sexual abuse, and in a few intricate dialogues we witness her understanding of the intersection of personal violation and government power. When Anne’s situation with Théo inevitably goes wrong, she utilizes this knowledge against the boy. And yet Breillat goes even further. The affair doesn’t end.
Breillat understands about sex the property of self-annihilation, the need to lose ourselves in its animal-ness. For Anne, there is also the thrill of potentially tearing everything she’s built down, and in reversing every ideal that she’s ever represented. We are seeing a great artist wrestle with the potential psychology of sex crimes, and with how they intersect with vast social sex mythologies. This is what a movie unshackled by political correctness feels like: dangerous. Breillat looks you in the eyes and asks you how much of yourself, under good manners, might also be an animal.
“Cuckoo” is currently in theaters everywhere while “Last Summer” is playing at Movieland.
