Cuckoo is designed as one of the quintessential horror films of the decade and chock-full of tropes from fetish porn that are almost certainly meant to fly under the radar, making this film equal parts subversive and campy. Hunter Schafer is effusive, indefatigable, the consummate scream queen performance, in perfect opposition to Dan Stevens’s over the top, deadpan evil doctor.
We talk a lot about the way in which horror tropes are most effective when there’s a way to link the magic to realism, to embed contemporary issues into a metaphor, and Cuckoo is both on the nose by adopting the monster of the decade as its title while also following in Immaculate‘s footsteps by training its aim at some amorphous critique of the American culture war on women’s reproduction. The critique isn’t heavy-handed or entirely one-to-one, and a lot of what makes this movie so uncomfortable and weird is the way that this second metaphor is expanded upon and developed over the course of the film using porn tropes from hypnosis, mind control, and breeding subcultures: the way in which the sound of the cuckoo sends women (and only women) into a fugue state; the way that most of the girls who are walking around town are pregnant (unknowingly or knowingly) or showing pregnancy symptoms; the sleep-walking; even the queer subplot so wonderfully setting up false hope in the second act; amnesia and gaslighting of pregnancy; or the way that women characters entranced by the monster frantically grope their own legs before preparing for breeding (a scene that happens more than once). All of it is sly and subtle but also faintly erotic and unsettling because of the way that so many bystanders get caught in the dragnet of these symptoms.
Schafer’s sister is mute and communicates through sign (á la Shape of Water or A Quiet Place), which makes for some interesting moments in the script that are some of the most emotive of the entire film. The Mexican stand-off at the end reveals some really fun writing as our story fragments into four distinct and very empathetic motivations clash with one another. I ended up watching this one again with Bestie later this fall and it hits just as well on second viewing. Schafer’s dialogue makes her the only sane person among a whole cast of zany Buffy-esque gaslit characters, and the sheer amount of pain that she endures during the course of the film is absolutely bananas. Fourteen babadooks for this one.
