If you have Dan Stevens playing a freaky little guy,
your movie is gonna be at least a little good.
Cuckoo continues a very good year for horror in 2024.
Hunter Schafer plays Gretchen,
a girl whose family goes to live in this odd,
remote European town. It doesn’t want to be there.
Her parents are paying far too much attention to her half sister.
She takes this dead end job
just to make enough money to try to fly back home.
But there’s something mysterious of it.
That tension, that fear of the unknown
plays very well in the first half of this movie.
I don’t want to say what the thing is,
so you can just go in blind if you need to,
but it’s very unsettling. And Hunter Schafer’s performance is great.
Really honing in on those rebellious teenager
doesn’t want to be here vibes,
but kicks it into high gear for the second half.
I’ll say this.
I don’t think a horror movie needs to explain every little thing.
I think in a lot of cases,
not explaining things, leaving it up to interpretation or up to what?
What you’re most afraid of in your mind,
can be more effective.
But if you do try to explain it and it’s just uninteresting
or it doesn’t quite live up to the hype,
it can be a little bit of a downer.
That’s not to say the back half of cuckoo is bad by any means.
I think That’s where Hunter Schafer and Dan Stevens really shine.
I just think if it went for a little bit more cohesion,
went a little harder
in trying to wrap up everything we had seen previously,
it would be like an old timer for 2024.