There are eerie shades of Gore Verbinski’s A Cure for Wellness (minus that film’s 17 different endings) in Tilman Singer’s spooky sanatorium thriller. Singer, who scored a disconcerting horror-festival hit with Luz, goes big – maybe too big – with this wild follow-up.
Hunter Schafer is Gretchen, the committed, physically enduring final girl at the dark heart of this flamboyantly unhinged tribute to Eurohorror. Gretchen, an American teenager mourning her mom, is reluctantly transplanted to a Bavarian mountain resort with the second family of her dad, Luis (Marton Csokas), including stepmother Beth (Jessica Henwick) and mute half-sister Alma (Mila Lieu).
Their creepy host, Herr König (Dan Stevens, outdoing his bonkers turn in The Guest), is keen for the family to stay and help design a new retreat in his ill-defined hospital-tourist hot spot.
Gretchen is immediately suspicious. After a violent encounter with a red-eyed woman, the local cops “change” her statement. Why do guests mysteriously vomit? What is the source of the screeching noises in the forest? Why does her half-sister seem possessed? And what about the temporal loops?
‘When these women left home there were rumours that they were sent to Europe to be concubines for black soldiers’
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The film’s crazed ornithological-adjacent mythology, echoing the wildest schemes from Italian giallo films, answers these and many other queries. Almost.
The gunplay of the final act isn’t as much fun as the properly creepy build-up. No matter. This self-aware German-Hollywood coproduction atones with plenty of Teutonsploitation humour. No film since Eli Roth’s Hostel has made so merry with Mittel-European manners. Stevens, a fluent German speaker, is note perfect, simultaneously silly, serious and scary. The all-eras aesthetic, replete with mobile phones, cassette tapes and, oh yes, cuckoo clocks, adds to the unsettling ambiguity of the Alpine isolation. Schafer, chiming perfectly with the scattershot campness of the script, puts in some of the best stoic limping since the first Die Hard movie.
Cuckoo is in cinemas from Friday, August 23rd
