‘Cuckoo’ Review: A Superb Hunter Schafer is Menaced by a Loopy Dan Stevens in a Stylish, Enjoyably Incoherent Horror Romp

variety.com:

Jessica Kiang Expanding on the scope of his impressive but constrained 2018 debut (the demonic-possession-meets-therapeutic-improv-exercise “Luz”) while retaining that film’s bird-flipping attitude toward unnecessary niceties like coherent plotting or narrative logic, German director Tilman Singer makes what ought to be his breakthrough with “Cuckoo” an energetically outlandish fusion of stylish atmospherics, old-school reproductive horror and pro-flickknife advertorial.

The profile of this highly enjoyable, unashamedly convoluted creepfest will be further raised by “Euphoria” star Hunter Schafer‘s terrific Final Girl performance and by Dan Stevens‘ hilariously eccentric villain, the second recent showcase for Stevens’ excellent spoken German after Maria Schrader’s “I’m Your Man.” Few are the films and fewer are the actors that can get such sinister mileage out of a character’s insistently Teutonic, semi-sibilant mispronunciation of the name “Gretchen.” Gretchen, aka “Ggrraaytshayn” (Schafer) appears, initially, to be the cuckoo.

Sent to live with her estranged father Luis (Marton Csokas), his second wife Beth (Jessica Henwick) and their mute, eight-year-old daughter Alma (Mila Lieu) just as they are decamping to a Bavarian Alpine resort, Gretchen is surly and homesick for the US, and for the mother whom she often telephones but who never picks up her calls.

Luis and Beth spent their honeymoon here years ago, and became friendly with the resort’s wealthy, and very obviously insane owner, Herr König (Stevens) — a character so pristinely macabre that he could only have been written by a German with a finely honed instinct for how the rest of the world tends to caricature his countrymen.