The Stream: Very strange and not scary.

The Big Screen: Original concept, I guess?

The Final Bill: What in the world did I just watch?

– S2S: Movie Review
Director: Tilman Singer
Writers: Tilman Singer
Stars: Hunter Schafer, Jan Bluthardt, Marton Csokas
Genre: Teen Horror, Horror, Mystery, Thriller
Rating: R (Violence and gore)
Runtime: 1 hour 36 minutes
Production Companies: Fiction Park, Neon, Waypoint Entertainment
Platform: Released in theaters August 9, 2024
Notable Trailers: Anora, Speak No Evil, Afraid, A Real Pain, Joker 2, The Monkey

Welcome back, Streamers! This week I was tricked by a trailer and a co-worker into seeing a movie I’d never heard about, Cuckoo. Check out the trailer below. Anyway, the movie follows Gretchen, an American teen, who is reluctantly moving with her father and his new family to a resort in the German Alps. Weird things start happening, and Gretchen is charged with figuring it out while tryinf to save her family. Cuckoo hijinks ensue.

This review will be summed up in the exact experience I saw after walking out of the theater. Picture it… Sicily August 8, 2024. I walk out of the theater. I use the restroom. I walk out of the restroom to see the heartwarming interaction between a father and son. Father looks at son. Son looks at father and says, “What in the world did we just watch?” And, that’s exactly how I felt about this movie. Why? What? How? Why again? Huh? I have these questions even though the concept is pretty fleshed out. What were the filmmakers of this movie really trying to get at? I feel like this was trying to be super preachy but also somehow lost it’s soapbox in the filming. Not only is this movie weird enough to really scare you, like a Midsommar, Barbarian, or It Follows, it’s also just not scary. The weirdest thing is a goop that was never explained, or I missed it. The scariest things, if any, are all in the trailer. The weirdest thing of the movie never pans out. And, the worst part of the whole thing is the whiny teen story in the backdrop of the whole movie. All in all, the execution of the three elements just has the movie limp across the finish line. The saving grace of the movie is the movie is filmed and sound edited pretty well. I couldn’t tell if the movie was interesting to watch because it was weird or because the camera work was so crisp.

Needless to say, Cuckoo is a horror movie that lacks horror. Cuckoo is weird enough to keep you interested in the story, but the story is also just lame. Cuckoo is definitely something you can wait on to watch and if nothing else is on during the Halloween season, then consider watching it with a single popped kernel of popcorn.