Cuckoo (2024)

Cuckoo is a 2024 Bavarian alpine horror film, and its cultural profile is uneven. Hunter Schafer headlines as the grieving teenager Gretchen, which gives the film representation at the casting level. The script does not write Gretchen as trans, so the significance sits in the performer and not the text. The supporting ensemble is international in a way that feels organic, not assembled for a brochure. The queer thread between Gretchen and Ed is present and matter-of-fact: two young women plan to run away together. It never becomes a sermon. The female protagonist drives the action and dispatches threats herself, but that is slasher convention more than an articulated feminist argument.

The rest of the ledger is sparse. The resort is a white European enclave and the film engages no racial themes or commentary. There is no climate dimension. There is no body-positive messaging. The anti-capitalist note is faint: Herr König is a wealthy resort operator running sinister experiments, but he reads as a mad-scientist villain, not a class critique. The film gestures at disability representation through Alma, who is mute, uses text-to-speech, and suffers seizures. Yet the story explains her condition as cuckoo species biology, so the gesture dissolves into creature lore. No revisionist history appears. This is a contemporary original horror story with no historical argument.

The sermonizing impulse is nearly absent. Tilman Singer directs with a lurid, self-aware commitment to atmosphere and shock. The film takes itself seriously in the way a B-movie takes itself seriously, which is to say it never pauses to instruct the audience. It is a madcap madhouse of reproductive horror, knife work, and Alpine dread. The cultural vintage here is light-bodied, with a mineral finish of casting and a faint floral note of queer romance. The sacred duty of classification yields a modest, uneven profile: a few progressive signals, many empty slots, and no sermon at the end.