REVIEW #398 Cuckoo (2024)

SYNOPSIS

A tragedy in the family leaves young women Gretchen leaving America to live with her father in the German Alps. But all is not as it seems as Gretchen discovers a mysterious secret about the area and its locals.

REVIEW

This week I attended my first Secret Screaming event put on by Cineworld and when I found out that the movie would be the upcoming horror film Cuckoo, I was pretty damn happy! Unfortunately the movie didn’t quite live up to those expectations and although the performances were impressive, the script was far from it. Hunter Schafer seemed right at home in the horror genre and she led by example as the central protagonist Gretchen! To be honest, for a relatively small film, the cast was pretty stacked, full of familiar faces and impressive actors. However, the script really let them down and I felt like it wasted the talents of Dan Stevens. The typical villainous exposition, revealing the motives for the antagonist, fell completely flat, the entire thing just didn’t make any sense! They never really explain why things were being done and it hid behind the usual genre trope of the psychopathic scientist and run away from trying to incorporate that into a logical storytelling narrative. It perfectly represents the reason why I have historically had such distaste for horror movies because they often chuck together a bunch of paper thin plot points and use the genre and the odd jump scare, as an excuse for incredibly poor writing. That being said, it’s still enjoyable despite its faults. 

RATING: Overall (6/10)

Thanks for reading.

Callan (Film Review Club)